Tuesday, November 23, 2004
JSH: Better now
I don't know if you noticed but I had a tremendous drop in confidence concomittant with a dramatic grip of existential crisis.
But I feel much better now and my confidence is restored, and I've learned to handle better the implications of my own research.
I guess there's no way any of you would understand what it's like to end up with some research result far bigger than you ever wanted, finding something you didn't want to find, where that makes everything so much harder.
It would have been easier for me in many ways for there not to be this problem with algebraic integers which is so HUGE where it impacts so many areas in mathematics and extends out into the physics world through group theory—though not so much in a bad way!
It's like the screw-up in the math world might have helped physics as group theory got developed, so what if the underlying mathematical ideas were slightly off?
Hey, in physics, if it works, it works.
In any event, for me, there was that lagging doubt that maybe somewhere along the way someone would find something just WRONG with what I had, and why would that be a surprise or not a good thing?
But a lot of people having looked over my work, with a lot of criticisms considered lead me to finally just have to accept that it is correct, despite my severe misgivings.
You know that technique of non-polynomial factorization may lead to new physics theories that can probe into a finer mathematical structure of electron, quarks and other physical particles than anyone ever even dreamed might exist?
Sigh. Of course you don't. That's ok though as it'd shock the hell out of me if any of you had even a minor grasp of how big all of this is, as that would mean you are, um, different in important ways than what I've gathered over years of making these posts and watching the effects.
Now the wait is on a math journal. I'm still not sufficiently motivated to re-write my other papers. So far the paper I wrote on surrogate factoring got a nice paper, but not for us, please send to another journal from a journal in the top 5, while Combinatorica passed on my paper deriving the prime counting function, which is kind
of ok, as it had a minor, sort of error, which they didn't notice. I kind of wonder about this peer review thing.
Hey, NONE of them have given me copies of comments from reviewers. When do you get those? Southwest Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics didn't either.
Is there some kind of weird rule going on where I don't get comments from reviewers? Maybe from fear I'll just post them?
But I feel much better now and my confidence is restored, and I've learned to handle better the implications of my own research.
I guess there's no way any of you would understand what it's like to end up with some research result far bigger than you ever wanted, finding something you didn't want to find, where that makes everything so much harder.
It would have been easier for me in many ways for there not to be this problem with algebraic integers which is so HUGE where it impacts so many areas in mathematics and extends out into the physics world through group theory—though not so much in a bad way!
It's like the screw-up in the math world might have helped physics as group theory got developed, so what if the underlying mathematical ideas were slightly off?
Hey, in physics, if it works, it works.
In any event, for me, there was that lagging doubt that maybe somewhere along the way someone would find something just WRONG with what I had, and why would that be a surprise or not a good thing?
But a lot of people having looked over my work, with a lot of criticisms considered lead me to finally just have to accept that it is correct, despite my severe misgivings.
You know that technique of non-polynomial factorization may lead to new physics theories that can probe into a finer mathematical structure of electron, quarks and other physical particles than anyone ever even dreamed might exist?
Sigh. Of course you don't. That's ok though as it'd shock the hell out of me if any of you had even a minor grasp of how big all of this is, as that would mean you are, um, different in important ways than what I've gathered over years of making these posts and watching the effects.
Now the wait is on a math journal. I'm still not sufficiently motivated to re-write my other papers. So far the paper I wrote on surrogate factoring got a nice paper, but not for us, please send to another journal from a journal in the top 5, while Combinatorica passed on my paper deriving the prime counting function, which is kind
of ok, as it had a minor, sort of error, which they didn't notice. I kind of wonder about this peer review thing.
Hey, NONE of them have given me copies of comments from reviewers. When do you get those? Southwest Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics didn't either.
Is there some kind of weird rule going on where I don't get comments from reviewers? Maybe from fear I'll just post them?
# posted by James Harris @ 06:58 
