Previous post: About expository writing: a reply to posic
At 10:30 p.m. US Eastern Summer time, the winner of this (2014) year Fields medals will be announced in Seoul.
I would like to post my current guess, mostly to have a record of it with the date and time stamp from Google, at least for myself.
As I wrote about one year ago, I believe that I would be able to predict the actual winners if I would know the composition of the Fields medals committee. But I don't. I am not particularly interested in the names of the winners, so I did not attempted to find out the actual winners, who are known for at least three months already, and who are known to the press for at least two weeks already (if the practice of the last two congresses was continued). So, my guess is a guess and not based on any inside sources.
And the winner are (expected to be):
Artur Avila - my confidence is over 95-99%.
One of the winners will be a woman - my confidence is over 95%. This is a pure politics. This deserves a separate discussion. The main obstruction to the Fields medal for a woman is not the discrimination, but the absurd age restriction. Most likely, she is
Sophie Morel - my confidence is over 80%. There are political consideration against her. For example, she would be the 3rd medalist who was a student of Gérard Laumon.
Jacob Lurie - my confidence is about 60%. This is my favorite candidate. He will get it if Harvard has enough political clout now. So, it is a measure of the influence of the Harvard Department of Mathematics, and not of the level of J. Lurie as a mathematician.
Manjul Bhargava - my confidence is less than 50%. If Sophie Morel gets a medal, his chances are much lower than otherwise: two mathematicians from the same university (Princeton).
Following the tradition firmly established since 1990, one of the medals should go a "Russian" mathematician, no matter where she or he is working know and where she or he completed Ph.D. I don't see any suitable candidate. Some people were naming Alexei Borodin, but I was firmly told that he will not get one.
A couple of days ago a strange, apparently unmotivated idea come to my mind: one of the winners will be from Stanford. Some people were naming Maryam Mirzakhani, but, again, a couple of days ago was firmly told that she is not the winner. Her work is interesting and close to my own interests. In my personal opinion, she has some very good results, but nothing of the Fields medal level. I would estimate the number of mathematician of about her level or higher, working in closely related areas, as at least 2-3 dozens. Of course, I am not aware about her most recent unpublished (at least on the web) work.
Next post: And who actually got Fields medals?
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Did J. Lurie solved any big problem?
Previous post: Guessing who will get Fields medals - Some history and 2014.
Tamas Gabal asked the following question.
Short answer: I don't care. Here is a long answer.
Well, this is the reason why my opinion about Lurie is somewhat conditional. As I already said, if an impartial committee confirms the significance of Lurie’s work, it will remove my doubts and, very likely, will stimulate me to study his work in depth. It is much harder to predict what will be the influence of the actual committee. Perhaps, I will try to learn his work in any case. If he will not get the medal, then in the hope to make sure that the committee is wrong.
I planned to discuss many peculiarities of mathematical prizes in another post, but one of these peculiarities ought to be mentioned now. Most of mathematical prizes go to people who solved some “important problems”. In fact, most of them go to people who made the last step in solving a problem. There is recent and famous example at hand: the Clay $1,000,000.00 prize was awarded to Perelman alone. But the method was designed by R. Hamilton, who did a huge amount of work, but wasn’t able to made “the last step”. Perhaps, just because of age. As Perelman said to a Russian news agency, he declined the prize because in his opinion Hamilton’s work is no less important than his own, and Hamilton deserves the prize no less than him. It seems that this reason still not known widely enough. To the best of my knowledge, it was not included in any press-release of the Clay Institute. The Clay Institute scheduled the award ceremony like they knew nothing, and then held the ceremony as planned. Except Grisha Perelman wasn’t present, and he did not accept the prize in any sense.
So, the prizes go to mathematicians who did the last step in the solution of a recognized problem. The mathematicians building the theories on which these solutions are based almost never get Fields medals. Their chances are more significant when prize is a prize for the life-time contribution (as is the case with the Abel prize). There are few exceptions.
First of all, A. Grothendieck is an exception. He proved part of the Weil conjectures, but not the most important one (later proved by P. Deligne). One of the Weil conjectures (the basic one) was independently proved by B. Dwork, by a completely different and independent method, and published earlier (by the way, this is fairly accessible and extremely beautiful piece of work). The report of J. Dieudonne at the 1966 Congress outlines a huge theory, to a big extent still not written down then. It includes some theorems, like the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch theorem, but: (i) GRR theorem does not solve any established problem, it is a radically new type of a statement; (ii) Grothendieck did not published his proof, being of the opinion that the proof is not good enough (an exposition was published by Borel and Serre); (iii) it is just a byproduct of his new way of thinking.
D. Quillen (Fields medal 1978) did solve some problems, but his main achievement is a solution of a very unusual problem: to give a good definition of so-called higher algebraic K-functors. It is a theory. Moreover, there are other solutions. Eventually, it turns out that they all provide equivalent definitions. But Quillen’s definitions (actually, he suggested two) are much better than others.
So, I do not care much if Lurie solved some “important problems” or not. Moreover, in the current situation I rather prefer that he did not solved any well-known problems, if he will get a Fields medal. The contrast with the Hungarian combinatorics, which is concentrated on statements and problems, will make the mathematics healthier.
Problems are very misleading. Often they achieve their status not because they are really important, but because a prize was associated with them (Fermat Last Theorem), or they were posed by a famous mathematicians. An example of the last situation is nothing else but the Poincaré Conjecture – in fact, Poincaré did not stated it as a conjecture, he just mentioned that “it would be interesting to know the answer to the following question”. It is not particularly important by itself. It claims that one difficult to verify property (being homeomorphic to a 3-sphere) is equivalent to another difficult to verify property (having trivial fundamental group). In practice, if you know that the fundamental group is trivial, you know also that your manifold is a 3-sphere.
Next post: New ideas.
Tamas Gabal asked the following question.
I heard a criticism of Lurie's work, that it does not contain startling new ideas, complete solutions of important problems, even new conjectures. That he is simply rewriting old ideas in a new language. I am very far from this area, and I find it a little disturbing that only the ultimate experts speak highly of his work. Even people in related areas can not usually give specific examples of his greatness. I understand that his objectives may be much more long-term, but I would still like to hear some response to these criticisms.
Short answer: I don't care. Here is a long answer.
Well, this is the reason why my opinion about Lurie is somewhat conditional. As I already said, if an impartial committee confirms the significance of Lurie’s work, it will remove my doubts and, very likely, will stimulate me to study his work in depth. It is much harder to predict what will be the influence of the actual committee. Perhaps, I will try to learn his work in any case. If he will not get the medal, then in the hope to make sure that the committee is wrong.
I planned to discuss many peculiarities of mathematical prizes in another post, but one of these peculiarities ought to be mentioned now. Most of mathematical prizes go to people who solved some “important problems”. In fact, most of them go to people who made the last step in solving a problem. There is recent and famous example at hand: the Clay $1,000,000.00 prize was awarded to Perelman alone. But the method was designed by R. Hamilton, who did a huge amount of work, but wasn’t able to made “the last step”. Perhaps, just because of age. As Perelman said to a Russian news agency, he declined the prize because in his opinion Hamilton’s work is no less important than his own, and Hamilton deserves the prize no less than him. It seems that this reason still not known widely enough. To the best of my knowledge, it was not included in any press-release of the Clay Institute. The Clay Institute scheduled the award ceremony like they knew nothing, and then held the ceremony as planned. Except Grisha Perelman wasn’t present, and he did not accept the prize in any sense.
So, the prizes go to mathematicians who did the last step in the solution of a recognized problem. The mathematicians building the theories on which these solutions are based almost never get Fields medals. Their chances are more significant when prize is a prize for the life-time contribution (as is the case with the Abel prize). There are few exceptions.
First of all, A. Grothendieck is an exception. He proved part of the Weil conjectures, but not the most important one (later proved by P. Deligne). One of the Weil conjectures (the basic one) was independently proved by B. Dwork, by a completely different and independent method, and published earlier (by the way, this is fairly accessible and extremely beautiful piece of work). The report of J. Dieudonne at the 1966 Congress outlines a huge theory, to a big extent still not written down then. It includes some theorems, like the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch theorem, but: (i) GRR theorem does not solve any established problem, it is a radically new type of a statement; (ii) Grothendieck did not published his proof, being of the opinion that the proof is not good enough (an exposition was published by Borel and Serre); (iii) it is just a byproduct of his new way of thinking.
D. Quillen (Fields medal 1978) did solve some problems, but his main achievement is a solution of a very unusual problem: to give a good definition of so-called higher algebraic K-functors. It is a theory. Moreover, there are other solutions. Eventually, it turns out that they all provide equivalent definitions. But Quillen’s definitions (actually, he suggested two) are much better than others.
So, I do not care much if Lurie solved some “important problems” or not. Moreover, in the current situation I rather prefer that he did not solved any well-known problems, if he will get a Fields medal. The contrast with the Hungarian combinatorics, which is concentrated on statements and problems, will make the mathematics healthier.
Problems are very misleading. Often they achieve their status not because they are really important, but because a prize was associated with them (Fermat Last Theorem), or they were posed by a famous mathematicians. An example of the last situation is nothing else but the Poincaré Conjecture – in fact, Poincaré did not stated it as a conjecture, he just mentioned that “it would be interesting to know the answer to the following question”. It is not particularly important by itself. It claims that one difficult to verify property (being homeomorphic to a 3-sphere) is equivalent to another difficult to verify property (having trivial fundamental group). In practice, if you know that the fundamental group is trivial, you know also that your manifold is a 3-sphere.
Next post: New ideas.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
2014 Fields medalists?
Previous post: New comments to the post "What is mathematics?"
I was asked by Tamas Gabal about possible 2014 Fields medalists listed in an online poll. I am neither ready to systematically write down my thoughts about the prizes in general and Fields medals in particular, nor to predict who will get 2014 medals. I am sure that the world would be better without any prizes, especially without Fields medals. Also, in my opinion, no more than two persons deserve 2014 Fields medals. Instead of trying to argue these points, I will quote my reply to Tamas Gabal (slightly edited).
Somewhat later I wrote:
Tamas Gabal replied:
Here is my reply.
Good question. In order to put a name on a list, one has to know this name, i.e. recognize it. But I knew much more than 10 names. Actually, this is one of the topics I wanted to write about sometime in details. The whole atmosphere at that time was completely different from what I see around now. May be the place also played some role, but I doubt that its role was decisive. Most of the people around me liked to talk about mathematics, and not only about what they were doing. When some guy in Japan claimed that he proved the Riemann hypothesis, I knew about this the same week. Note that the internet was still in the future, as were e-mails. I had a feeling that I know about everything important going on in mathematics. I always had a little bit more curiosity than others, so I knew also about fields fairly remote from own work.
I do not remember all 10 names on my list (I remember about 7), but 4 winners were included. It was quite easy to guess 3 of them. Everybody would agree that they were the main contenders. I am really proud about guessing the 4th one. Nobody around was talking about him or even mentioned him, and his field is quite far from my own interests. To what extent I understood their work? I studied some work of one winner, knew the statements and had some idea about their proof for another one (later the work of both of them influenced a lot my own work, but mostly indirectly), and very well knew what are the achievements of the third one, why they are important, etc. I knew more or less just the statements of two main results of the 4th one, the one who was difficult to guess – for me. I was able to explain why this or that guy got the medal even to a theoretical physicist (actually did on one occasion). But I wasn’t able to teach a topic course about works of any of the 4.
At the time I never heard any complaints that a medal went to a wrong person. The same about all older awards. There was always a consensus in the mathematical community than all the people who got the medal deserved it. May be somebody else also deserved it too, but there are only 3 or 4 of them each time.
Mathematics is a human activity. This is one of the facts that T. Gowers prefers to ignore. Nobody verifies proofs line by line. Initially, you trust your guts feelings. If you need to use a theorem, you will be forced to study the proof and understand its main ideas. The same is true about the deepness of a result. You do not need to know all the proofs in order to write down a list like my list of 10 most likely winners (next time my list consisted of no more than 5 or 6, all winner were included). It seems that I knew the work of all guessed winners better than Gowers knew the work of 2010 medalists. But even if not, there is a huge difference between a graduate student trying to guess the current year winners, and a Fellow of the London Royal Society, a Fields medalist himself, who is deciding who will get 2010 medals. He should know more.
The job is surely not an easy one now, when it is all about politics. Otherwise it would be very pleasant.
Next post: Guessing who will get Fields medals - Some history and 2014.
I was asked by Tamas Gabal about possible 2014 Fields medalists listed in an online poll. I am neither ready to systematically write down my thoughts about the prizes in general and Fields medals in particular, nor to predict who will get 2014 medals. I am sure that the world would be better without any prizes, especially without Fields medals. Also, in my opinion, no more than two persons deserve 2014 Fields medals. Instead of trying to argue these points, I will quote my reply to Tamas Gabal (slightly edited).
Would I know who the members of the Fields medal committee are, I would be able to predict medalists with 99% confidence. But the composition of the committee is a secret. In the past, the situation was rather different. The composition of the committee wasn't important. When I was just a second year graduate student, I compiled a list of 10 candidates, among whom I considered 5 to have significantly higher chances (I never wrote down this partition, and the original list is lost for all practical purposes). All 4 winners were on the list. I was especially proud of predicting one of them; he was a fairly nontraditional at the time (or so I thought). I cannot do anything like this now without knowing the composition of the committee. Recent choices appear to be more or less random, with some obvious exceptions (like Grisha Perelman).
Somewhat later I wrote:
In the meantime I looked at the current results of that poll. Look like the preferences of the public are determined by the same mechanism as the preferences for movie actors and actresses: the name recognition.
Tamas Gabal replied:
Sowa, when you were a graduate student and made that list of possible winners, did you not rely on name recognition at least partially? Were you familiar with their work? That would be pretty impressive for a graduate student, since T. Gowers basically admitted that he was not really familiar with the work of Fields medalists in 2010, while he was a member of the committee. I wonder if anyone can honestly compare the depth of the work of all these candidates? The committee will seek an opinion of senior people in each area (again, based on name recognition, positions, etc.) and will be influenced by whoever makes the best case... It's not an easy job for sure.
Here is my reply.
Good question. In order to put a name on a list, one has to know this name, i.e. recognize it. But I knew much more than 10 names. Actually, this is one of the topics I wanted to write about sometime in details. The whole atmosphere at that time was completely different from what I see around now. May be the place also played some role, but I doubt that its role was decisive. Most of the people around me liked to talk about mathematics, and not only about what they were doing. When some guy in Japan claimed that he proved the Riemann hypothesis, I knew about this the same week. Note that the internet was still in the future, as were e-mails. I had a feeling that I know about everything important going on in mathematics. I always had a little bit more curiosity than others, so I knew also about fields fairly remote from own work.
I do not remember all 10 names on my list (I remember about 7), but 4 winners were included. It was quite easy to guess 3 of them. Everybody would agree that they were the main contenders. I am really proud about guessing the 4th one. Nobody around was talking about him or even mentioned him, and his field is quite far from my own interests. To what extent I understood their work? I studied some work of one winner, knew the statements and had some idea about their proof for another one (later the work of both of them influenced a lot my own work, but mostly indirectly), and very well knew what are the achievements of the third one, why they are important, etc. I knew more or less just the statements of two main results of the 4th one, the one who was difficult to guess – for me. I was able to explain why this or that guy got the medal even to a theoretical physicist (actually did on one occasion). But I wasn’t able to teach a topic course about works of any of the 4.
At the time I never heard any complaints that a medal went to a wrong person. The same about all older awards. There was always a consensus in the mathematical community than all the people who got the medal deserved it. May be somebody else also deserved it too, but there are only 3 or 4 of them each time.
Mathematics is a human activity. This is one of the facts that T. Gowers prefers to ignore. Nobody verifies proofs line by line. Initially, you trust your guts feelings. If you need to use a theorem, you will be forced to study the proof and understand its main ideas. The same is true about the deepness of a result. You do not need to know all the proofs in order to write down a list like my list of 10 most likely winners (next time my list consisted of no more than 5 or 6, all winner were included). It seems that I knew the work of all guessed winners better than Gowers knew the work of 2010 medalists. But even if not, there is a huge difference between a graduate student trying to guess the current year winners, and a Fellow of the London Royal Society, a Fields medalist himself, who is deciding who will get 2010 medals. He should know more.
The job is surely not an easy one now, when it is all about politics. Otherwise it would be very pleasant.
Next post: Guessing who will get Fields medals - Some history and 2014.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Reply to a comment
Previous post: Freedom of speech in mathematics
This is a reply to a recent comment by an Anonymous.
Dear Anonymous,
Thank you very much for reading these notes and for writing a serious and stimulating comment. I was thinking about it for a few days, and I am still not sure that my reply will be convincing. But let me try.
The initial goal of this blog was to provide a context for my arguments in Gowers's blog and in another blog. The latter was quoted by another anonymous in Gowers’s blog, and I had no other choice as to try to explain them (the original comment was addressed to people who know me and my views fairly well). So, the concentration on Gowers's views and activities was only natural; this was the intention. Now this topic is more or less exhausted, and expanding the scope of the blog, or even changing it completely may be in order.
Gowers himself described his goals and said that achieving them will eliminate mathematics as we know it. There is nothing apocalyptic in my discussion of his ideas. I do not anticipate that he or his followers will achieve his goals. I do not think that humans are some sort of computers, and I do not think that computers can do real mathematics (definitely, they can do a lot of mathematical things better than humans, but only when a class of problems was completely understood by humans). But he may achieve his goal in an Orwellian way by changing the meaning of the word “mathematics”. He already shifted the preferences of a big part of mathematical community. It took about ten years. If he will be able to do a comparable feat in the next ten years, and then, may be with his followers, once more, “mathematics” will mean “Hungarian-style combinatorics”. And I do believe that the Hungarian-style combinatorics is a field where computers eventually will be superior to humans because a nearly exhaustive search for a proof will be more efficient than human insights (like it happened with chess, which is actually a branch of combinatorics).
Independently of this scenario, I believe that having a person intended to eliminate mathematics (even if his goal is not achievable) in position of such influence as Gowers is extremely unhealthy and dangerous.
I agree that an “open and critical analysis of very influential individuals or groups in the mathematics research community” is highly desirable. But I am not quite comfortable with the way you wrote about this: “what the discussion should be about”. First of all, I am not comfortable with writing this either, but this is my blog and I write about whatever I like and whenever I like. Perhaps, you meant to apply “should” not to me, but to the mathematical community itself. I will assume that this is what you meant.
I believe that such a discussion is hardly possible. As a rule, mathematicians strongly dislike to openly discuss any contentious issues. One may see this everywhere: from insignificant issues on a department of mathematics to major decision made by the AMS or Fields Medals Committee, for example. I would suggest these posts for publication in the Notices of the AMS (under my real name) if I would believe that there is some chance for them to be published.
To Editors of the Notices of the AMS: this is a challenge. Prove that I am wrong!
Anyhow, I am willing to participate in such an open discussion. There is no venue for this now. Still, I would be glad to expand this blog into such a venue. For example, it may be easily transformed into a collective blog, and, for example, you will be able to post here. You will need only a Google account for this, and I will need to know the name of the account and some way of verification that it belongs to the Anonymous who wrote the comment. I reserve the right to be the owner of the blog and its moderator (right now it is not moderated, comments appear without my approval). And, may be, I will eventually transfer it to somebody else.
Finally, I disagree that mathematics was “long dominated by geometry, topology, arithmetic geometry, etc.” By some reason the word “geometry” is very popular for a few decades, and topology is usually considered to be a branch of geometry. So, the word “geometry” was appended to almost any good mathematical theory. Say, Non-Commutative Geometry is actually a branch of functional analysis. Arithmetic Geometry is a branch of algebraic number theory. Topology is not a branch of geometry in the classical sense of the word “geometry”. Algebraic Topology is a branch of algebra. Well, I realize that this is a sort of scandalous statement. It took me many years to come to this conclusion. There was a subfield of topology called Geometric Topology (it is hardly alive by now); this would be a nonsense would topology be indeed a branch of geometry.
So, in my opinion mathematics was long dominated by good mathematics, but this is not the case anymore.
Next post: Happy New Year!
This is a reply to a recent comment by an Anonymous.
Dear Anonymous,
Thank you very much for reading these notes and for writing a serious and stimulating comment. I was thinking about it for a few days, and I am still not sure that my reply will be convincing. But let me try.
The initial goal of this blog was to provide a context for my arguments in Gowers's blog and in another blog. The latter was quoted by another anonymous in Gowers’s blog, and I had no other choice as to try to explain them (the original comment was addressed to people who know me and my views fairly well). So, the concentration on Gowers's views and activities was only natural; this was the intention. Now this topic is more or less exhausted, and expanding the scope of the blog, or even changing it completely may be in order.
Gowers himself described his goals and said that achieving them will eliminate mathematics as we know it. There is nothing apocalyptic in my discussion of his ideas. I do not anticipate that he or his followers will achieve his goals. I do not think that humans are some sort of computers, and I do not think that computers can do real mathematics (definitely, they can do a lot of mathematical things better than humans, but only when a class of problems was completely understood by humans). But he may achieve his goal in an Orwellian way by changing the meaning of the word “mathematics”. He already shifted the preferences of a big part of mathematical community. It took about ten years. If he will be able to do a comparable feat in the next ten years, and then, may be with his followers, once more, “mathematics” will mean “Hungarian-style combinatorics”. And I do believe that the Hungarian-style combinatorics is a field where computers eventually will be superior to humans because a nearly exhaustive search for a proof will be more efficient than human insights (like it happened with chess, which is actually a branch of combinatorics).
Independently of this scenario, I believe that having a person intended to eliminate mathematics (even if his goal is not achievable) in position of such influence as Gowers is extremely unhealthy and dangerous.
I agree that an “open and critical analysis of very influential individuals or groups in the mathematics research community” is highly desirable. But I am not quite comfortable with the way you wrote about this: “what the discussion should be about”. First of all, I am not comfortable with writing this either, but this is my blog and I write about whatever I like and whenever I like. Perhaps, you meant to apply “should” not to me, but to the mathematical community itself. I will assume that this is what you meant.
I believe that such a discussion is hardly possible. As a rule, mathematicians strongly dislike to openly discuss any contentious issues. One may see this everywhere: from insignificant issues on a department of mathematics to major decision made by the AMS or Fields Medals Committee, for example. I would suggest these posts for publication in the Notices of the AMS (under my real name) if I would believe that there is some chance for them to be published.
To Editors of the Notices of the AMS: this is a challenge. Prove that I am wrong!
Anyhow, I am willing to participate in such an open discussion. There is no venue for this now. Still, I would be glad to expand this blog into such a venue. For example, it may be easily transformed into a collective blog, and, for example, you will be able to post here. You will need only a Google account for this, and I will need to know the name of the account and some way of verification that it belongs to the Anonymous who wrote the comment. I reserve the right to be the owner of the blog and its moderator (right now it is not moderated, comments appear without my approval). And, may be, I will eventually transfer it to somebody else.
Finally, I disagree that mathematics was “long dominated by geometry, topology, arithmetic geometry, etc.” By some reason the word “geometry” is very popular for a few decades, and topology is usually considered to be a branch of geometry. So, the word “geometry” was appended to almost any good mathematical theory. Say, Non-Commutative Geometry is actually a branch of functional analysis. Arithmetic Geometry is a branch of algebraic number theory. Topology is not a branch of geometry in the classical sense of the word “geometry”. Algebraic Topology is a branch of algebra. Well, I realize that this is a sort of scandalous statement. It took me many years to come to this conclusion. There was a subfield of topology called Geometric Topology (it is hardly alive by now); this would be a nonsense would topology be indeed a branch of geometry.
So, in my opinion mathematics was long dominated by good mathematics, but this is not the case anymore.
Next post: Happy New Year!
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
The twist ending. 1
Previous post: T. Gowers about replacing mathematicians by computers. 2.
I thought that I more or less exhausted the topic of T. Gowers's mathematics and politics. I turned out to be wrong. The only aspect of Gowers's (quasi-)political activity which I supported was the initiated by him and supported by him boycott of Elsevier, the most predatory scientific publisher; namely the "Cost of Knowledge boycott". I had some reservations about the tactics (why Elsevier only, for example?), but felt that they are concerned with secondary issues and that the motives of Gowers are pure.
Well, in early July T. Tao published in his blog post "Forum of Mathematics, Pi and Forum of Mathematics, Sigma", which shed a lot of light on this political campaign. Further details were provided by T. Gowers himself in "A new open-access venture from Cambridge University Press".
It turned out that Gowers is also behind a project to establish a new electronic mathematical journal, or rather a system of new electronic journals, which will directly compete with the best existing journals, for example, with "Annals of Mathematics", which is usually regarded as simply the best one. In the words of T. Gowers:
Out of mentioned three journals, only the "Inventiones Mathematicae" (published by the second biggest scientific publisher after Reed-Elsevier, namely, Springer) is expensive. "Annals of Mathematics" is very cheap by any standards, and at the same time the most prestigious. One may suspect that it is subsidized by Princeton University, but I don't know. Why does it need any competition?
There is a buzz-word here: open access. Even the "Gold Open Access", which sounds great (this is what the buzz-words are for). Indeed, these journals are planned to be open for the readers, everybody will be able to download papers. But somebody is needed to pay at the very least for running a website, databases, for the servers. The "Gold" means that the authors pay. It is suggested that publishing an article in these "open" journals will cost the author $750.00 in current dollars, and the amount will be adjusted for inflation later. In order to attract authors, during the first three years this charge will be waived. Note that any new journal initially publishes mostly articles by the personal friends of the members of the editorial board; they will get a free ride. Gowers considers these three years free ride being really good news; I disagree and consider it to be a cheap trick to help launching his new journal(s).
I believe that it completely wrong to charge authors for publication. In the real world it is the authors who are paid if they done something good, be it a novel, a movie, or a painting. And what they will be paying for in this internet age? Not for the distribution of their papers, as before. Posting a paper at the ArXiv does this more efficiently than any journal. They will be paying for the prestige of the journal, i.e. for a line in CV which may increase their chances to get a good job, a salary raise, etc. This will introduce a new type of corruption into the mathematical community.
The idea of "gold open access" is very popular in the bio-medical sciences. If you work in a bio-med area, you need a big grant paying for your lab, equipment, lab technicians, etc. Adding to these huge costs only $750.00 per article is hardly noticeable (in fact, standard price for gold open access there is between two and three thousands depending on publisher). But mathematics is different. It is a cheap science. A lot of good mathematicians do not have any grants (about two thirds by an NSF estimate). In the current financial and political climate one cannot expect that their employers (the universities, except, perhaps, for a dozen of truly exceptional researches) will pay for publications. And $750.00 is not a negligible amount for a university professor, not to say about a graduate student.
I must mention that the idea of charging the author for the publication was realized in the past by some journals in the form of "page charges". The amount was proportional to the number of pages, since the typesetting costs were proportional; nowadays typesetting is done by the authors (which is, in fact, a hidden cost of publishing a paper), and only final touches are done by the publisher. Such journals existed about 30-something years ago. The author was never responsible for the payment, and if there was nobody to pay (no grant, the university has no such line in the budget) the paper was published anyhow. Still, the idea was abandoned in favor of the traditional publishing model: the one who wants to read a journal, pays for it. Exactly like in a grocery store: if you want an apple, then you pay for it, and not the farmer growing apple trees.
I believe that this idea of charging the authors for publications is much more morally reprehensible than anything done by Elsevier and is a sufficient ground for boycotting this Tao-Gowers initiative.
But this is not all...
Next post: The twist ending 2. A Cambridge don.
I thought that I more or less exhausted the topic of T. Gowers's mathematics and politics. I turned out to be wrong. The only aspect of Gowers's (quasi-)political activity which I supported was the initiated by him and supported by him boycott of Elsevier, the most predatory scientific publisher; namely the "Cost of Knowledge boycott". I had some reservations about the tactics (why Elsevier only, for example?), but felt that they are concerned with secondary issues and that the motives of Gowers are pure.
Well, in early July T. Tao published in his blog post "Forum of Mathematics, Pi and Forum of Mathematics, Sigma", which shed a lot of light on this political campaign. Further details were provided by T. Gowers himself in "A new open-access venture from Cambridge University Press".
It turned out that Gowers is also behind a project to establish a new electronic mathematical journal, or rather a system of new electronic journals, which will directly compete with the best existing journals, for example, with "Annals of Mathematics", which is usually regarded as simply the best one. In the words of T. Gowers:
"Thus, Pi papers will be at the level of leading general mathematics journals and will be an open-access alternative to them. Discussion is still going on about what precisely this means, but it looks as though the aim will probably be for Pi to be a serious competitor for Annals, Inventiones, the Journal of the AMS and the like."
Out of mentioned three journals, only the "Inventiones Mathematicae" (published by the second biggest scientific publisher after Reed-Elsevier, namely, Springer) is expensive. "Annals of Mathematics" is very cheap by any standards, and at the same time the most prestigious. One may suspect that it is subsidized by Princeton University, but I don't know. Why does it need any competition?
There is a buzz-word here: open access. Even the "Gold Open Access", which sounds great (this is what the buzz-words are for). Indeed, these journals are planned to be open for the readers, everybody will be able to download papers. But somebody is needed to pay at the very least for running a website, databases, for the servers. The "Gold" means that the authors pay. It is suggested that publishing an article in these "open" journals will cost the author $750.00 in current dollars, and the amount will be adjusted for inflation later. In order to attract authors, during the first three years this charge will be waived. Note that any new journal initially publishes mostly articles by the personal friends of the members of the editorial board; they will get a free ride. Gowers considers these three years free ride being really good news; I disagree and consider it to be a cheap trick to help launching his new journal(s).
I believe that it completely wrong to charge authors for publication. In the real world it is the authors who are paid if they done something good, be it a novel, a movie, or a painting. And what they will be paying for in this internet age? Not for the distribution of their papers, as before. Posting a paper at the ArXiv does this more efficiently than any journal. They will be paying for the prestige of the journal, i.e. for a line in CV which may increase their chances to get a good job, a salary raise, etc. This will introduce a new type of corruption into the mathematical community.
The idea of "gold open access" is very popular in the bio-medical sciences. If you work in a bio-med area, you need a big grant paying for your lab, equipment, lab technicians, etc. Adding to these huge costs only $750.00 per article is hardly noticeable (in fact, standard price for gold open access there is between two and three thousands depending on publisher). But mathematics is different. It is a cheap science. A lot of good mathematicians do not have any grants (about two thirds by an NSF estimate). In the current financial and political climate one cannot expect that their employers (the universities, except, perhaps, for a dozen of truly exceptional researches) will pay for publications. And $750.00 is not a negligible amount for a university professor, not to say about a graduate student.
I must mention that the idea of charging the author for the publication was realized in the past by some journals in the form of "page charges". The amount was proportional to the number of pages, since the typesetting costs were proportional; nowadays typesetting is done by the authors (which is, in fact, a hidden cost of publishing a paper), and only final touches are done by the publisher. Such journals existed about 30-something years ago. The author was never responsible for the payment, and if there was nobody to pay (no grant, the university has no such line in the budget) the paper was published anyhow. Still, the idea was abandoned in favor of the traditional publishing model: the one who wants to read a journal, pays for it. Exactly like in a grocery store: if you want an apple, then you pay for it, and not the farmer growing apple trees.
I believe that this idea of charging the authors for publications is much more morally reprehensible than anything done by Elsevier and is a sufficient ground for boycotting this Tao-Gowers initiative.
But this is not all...
Next post: The twist ending 2. A Cambridge don.
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