Saturday, June 09, 2007
JSH: Math people ARE different
To me arguing comes naturally in the search for truth as people have different points of views and might see something you miss or catch you on mistakes that you cannot easily see on your own.
The big surprise for me from the math community was figuring out that they argue to deny the truth, and do so as a group, so like, when I had a paper on some of my mathematical research published, as a group the sci.math newsgroup reacted in fury and some of them emailed the mathematical journal editors against my paper.
But what was really weird to me about that story was that in attacking the publication against my paper the math people attacked journals in general, claiming they often published wrong papers!!!
So they attacked the entire system. But later when I noted that they claimed they didn't!
Ultimately they seemed to settle on a paper only being important if it were published in a major journal and had general acceptance in the math community.
All that reaction was to me getting published and the rest of the story is the journal editors yanked my paper out of the published journal, as it was electronic so they could just change the file, managed one more edition and then quietly shut down.
The journal with the initials SWJPAM—on which it is the easiest to search for it—was a publication of Cameron University which previously had links to it on its websites, but it removed all of those so that the journals editions—and the papers published in it over nine years—would have been lost except that EMIS, a mirror server, decided to keep the journal alive.
See: http://www.emis.de/journals/SWJPAM/
Imagine, the university was willing to just toss over nine years of published mathematical papers!!! And nary a word in protest that I've noticed from the mathematical community.
What EMIS says at that link is the most I've heard on this entire thing from what one might call an official source.
That's the mathematical world and I think some of you have some weird noble idea of that world that is nothing like the reality as that story is factual. It is about the actual math world and what is possible within it.
My take on it is that it is a highly political world. Math people care about consensus first and foremost.
And they can deny ANYTHING.
Like I have talked about my find of a discrete damped oscillator as that makes it physics relevant but since 2002, when I made this discovery, I have talked about it in the math world because it counts prime numbers and it does so by summing a partial difference equation.
Turns out, there is no other known function, or any other research for that matter, where you get anything like it, as not only do you have this first of using a partial difference equation, so it actually finds primes on its own as it counts, but you can move to a partial differential equation, which is just mind-blowing, so it's easy to step through all the ways this research is unique.
But I can't get any traction in the math world, and in fact, on direct points over uniqueness I end up in bizarre arguments, admittedly on math newsgroups, with people who just deny the facts.
So, if you are naive or trusting in human nature, you may ask, why can't I just ask them to show something else like what I found?
I do. They lie in reply. These people seem to have nothing sacred.
They lie about prime numbers, they lie about simple equations and when I looked to find a reason, the only one that makes sense is that they do not wish to accept what is mathematically true for some rather basic reasons:
Yup, what I'm talking about is academic fraud.
Can it be stopped?
I think the odds are long. There's no sense in my mind that this post, for instance, will matter much more than any of the previous ones, and let's face it, mathematicians get away with this because, for instance, prime numbers are NOT really that important to the business of most of the world.
What they do is not relevant or meaningful anymore. Even in physics most of the mathematics that is needed was discovered long ago. These people may not have anything important to do!
In a sense they have a point that their world is no longer relevant, so it doesn't really matter much to what everyone else is doing if they are wrong, or ignore important research, and they do need to eat!
But they are different I think from physics people who are driven to find answers, and get to the truth—not just be convincing and keep getting paid.
Or I like to think they are. Who really knows and does it really matter?
Eventually our species like so many others before it will be extinct. In the meantime, well, we do what we do because, what else would we do?
And reality is that for most people perception IS reality. It's more important to believe that we're doing important things than to actually be doing important things.
Still it is sad. Often I feel sorry for these people who spend so much energy on things that are just not true that on some level they must know are not true.
But then again, other people make bigger sacrifices to care for themselves and their children.
People will do a lot to have a life, have kids, live comfortably. Lying is common in society's around the world.
Lying about math is not that big of a reach, not when a comfortable life, for you and your children, can be realized by just not caring about what is true about some math stuff.
But I do hope physics can to some extent escape falling into the same decline as the mathematics field has, but maybe it's inevitable.
Maybe species like humanity do die with a whimper, as I think many of us suspect—failing in every way, including in the search for truth.
Learning that pretend knowledge is better than truth, so that some people can feel comfortable, may just be a sign that a species is on its last legs.
The big surprise for me from the math community was figuring out that they argue to deny the truth, and do so as a group, so like, when I had a paper on some of my mathematical research published, as a group the sci.math newsgroup reacted in fury and some of them emailed the mathematical journal editors against my paper.
But what was really weird to me about that story was that in attacking the publication against my paper the math people attacked journals in general, claiming they often published wrong papers!!!
So they attacked the entire system. But later when I noted that they claimed they didn't!
Ultimately they seemed to settle on a paper only being important if it were published in a major journal and had general acceptance in the math community.
All that reaction was to me getting published and the rest of the story is the journal editors yanked my paper out of the published journal, as it was electronic so they could just change the file, managed one more edition and then quietly shut down.
The journal with the initials SWJPAM—on which it is the easiest to search for it—was a publication of Cameron University which previously had links to it on its websites, but it removed all of those so that the journals editions—and the papers published in it over nine years—would have been lost except that EMIS, a mirror server, decided to keep the journal alive.
See: http://www.emis.de/journals/SWJPAM/
Imagine, the university was willing to just toss over nine years of published mathematical papers!!! And nary a word in protest that I've noticed from the mathematical community.
What EMIS says at that link is the most I've heard on this entire thing from what one might call an official source.
That's the mathematical world and I think some of you have some weird noble idea of that world that is nothing like the reality as that story is factual. It is about the actual math world and what is possible within it.
My take on it is that it is a highly political world. Math people care about consensus first and foremost.
And they can deny ANYTHING.
Like I have talked about my find of a discrete damped oscillator as that makes it physics relevant but since 2002, when I made this discovery, I have talked about it in the math world because it counts prime numbers and it does so by summing a partial difference equation.
Turns out, there is no other known function, or any other research for that matter, where you get anything like it, as not only do you have this first of using a partial difference equation, so it actually finds primes on its own as it counts, but you can move to a partial differential equation, which is just mind-blowing, so it's easy to step through all the ways this research is unique.
But I can't get any traction in the math world, and in fact, on direct points over uniqueness I end up in bizarre arguments, admittedly on math newsgroups, with people who just deny the facts.
So, if you are naive or trusting in human nature, you may ask, why can't I just ask them to show something else like what I found?
I do. They lie in reply. These people seem to have nothing sacred.
They lie about prime numbers, they lie about simple equations and when I looked to find a reason, the only one that makes sense is that they do not wish to accept what is mathematically true for some rather basic reasons:
- My research helps settles questions thought big and open on which a lot of mathematicians are currently doing research. So accepting it would take away jobs.
- They feel invulnerable because society accepts them as experts and believes in them, trusts them, so even when they blatantly lie on something as seemingly obvious as whether or not a partial difference equation has EVER been used to count prime numbers, there's little I can do.
Yup, what I'm talking about is academic fraud.
Can it be stopped?
I think the odds are long. There's no sense in my mind that this post, for instance, will matter much more than any of the previous ones, and let's face it, mathematicians get away with this because, for instance, prime numbers are NOT really that important to the business of most of the world.
What they do is not relevant or meaningful anymore. Even in physics most of the mathematics that is needed was discovered long ago. These people may not have anything important to do!
In a sense they have a point that their world is no longer relevant, so it doesn't really matter much to what everyone else is doing if they are wrong, or ignore important research, and they do need to eat!
But they are different I think from physics people who are driven to find answers, and get to the truth—not just be convincing and keep getting paid.
Or I like to think they are. Who really knows and does it really matter?
Eventually our species like so many others before it will be extinct. In the meantime, well, we do what we do because, what else would we do?
And reality is that for most people perception IS reality. It's more important to believe that we're doing important things than to actually be doing important things.
Still it is sad. Often I feel sorry for these people who spend so much energy on things that are just not true that on some level they must know are not true.
But then again, other people make bigger sacrifices to care for themselves and their children.
People will do a lot to have a life, have kids, live comfortably. Lying is common in society's around the world.
Lying about math is not that big of a reach, not when a comfortable life, for you and your children, can be realized by just not caring about what is true about some math stuff.
But I do hope physics can to some extent escape falling into the same decline as the mathematics field has, but maybe it's inevitable.
Maybe species like humanity do die with a whimper, as I think many of us suspect—failing in every way, including in the search for truth.
Learning that pretend knowledge is better than truth, so that some people can feel comfortable, may just be a sign that a species is on its last legs.
# posted by James Harris @ 23:36 
