Tuesday, July 15, 2003

 

Reply from German editor about my paper

Well looks like I got bit on the "factor of" versus "factors in common with" controversy as a reply I just received from the chief editor of a German journal talks as if I'm saying that none of the a's has a factor of 5, that is 5. He also thought my lemma was a trivial result and he mentioned polynomial factors. Then he put me on a spam block, which I discovered when I tried to reply back to him.

Hmmm…I guess I'll not get much leeway from Germans.

In any event, if I'm facing real problems with the is "factor of" thing I'd just as soon change it, so I'll be evaluating my paper today to see about making changes to be more in line with common usage. I'll also consider the "coprime" part, which confused a mathematician at Cal-Tech, and I'm kind of sure there was at least one other that said so, which may mean that others were confused but never admitted
it.

It seems that mathematicians are kind of fragile on this terminology thing, so I'll try and get closer to standard usage, and then I'll find yet another journal. I say that as saying "3 has a factor of 12" is actually correct, as 3 has itself as a factor and 3 is a factor of 12, but mathematicians have gotten themselves stuck one way, and there's no point in fighting their slang.

I'm curious about what will come up next.





<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?