7 ms·

Interesting that the folks who wrote a proof based on the 4Chan user's post listed him as a first author. In all of my experience, Mathematics truly seems to be

Interesting that the folks who wrote a proof based on the 4Chan user's post listed him as a first author. In all of my experience, Mathematics truly seems to be the field with the highest integrity.

AmericanChopper 3y ago
Imagine getting disciplined for plagiarising your paper from 4chan tho…
kkylin 3y ago
> Mathematics truly seems to be the field with the highest integrity. Mathematician here. I'd like to think we have high (not sure about highest) integrity. But I should also point out that the custom in the field is to list authors alphabetically by family name, and the paper in question (https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf) does not break with custom if you view "anonymous" as "family name"...
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  I would think that "4Chan Poster" would be the "family name" here. Which, of course, would come lexicographically before most real family names.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    I would think they should have listed newfag as the author. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/newfag https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/newfag
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      Heh. "4Chan Poster, Newfag" would have been a great way to list the author's name. Perhaps ironically, the convention would then imply that newfag comes before oldfag. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oldfag https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oldfag
- mkl 3y ago
  > the custom in the field is to list authors alphabetically by family name This is only true in some fields of mathematics; many areas of mathematics do not follow this rule. (Also mathematician, and none of the papers I've been involved with have done the alphabetical thing.)
  - ykonstant 3y ago
    Which field doesn't?
- VyseofArcadia 3y ago
  Once talking with my wife, biologist, I, mathematician, said something like, "I never get first author because my name is so late in the alphabet", and she stared at me like I had just sprouted a second head. Confusion and shock. That's when she had to sit me down and explain that first author is super mega important in her field, not just who is literally listed first.
  - tejtm 3y ago
    errr... they are so hierarchically oriented they add in a different order of significant on the other end of the list of authors, so being first OR last is good
    - hgsgm 3y ago
      Same thing for TV show credits.
      - tejtm 3y ago
        that makes an unfortunate degree of sense
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jjgreen 3y ago
  I'm a mathematician and some years ago wrote a joint paper with some philosophers, I suggested the paper but we all did comparable amounts of work on it: they insisted that my name was first (which was non alphabetically), it made me really quite uncomfortable as I imagined that others would assume that I was some kind of arrogant arse who had insisted on precedence.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Paul-Craft 3y ago
I've mentioned this before on here, but mathematics papers don't use the usual rules for author ordering. By convention, more or less the entire field has agreed that authors shall be listed alphabetically. So, Max Zorn probably got listed last on every single multi-author paper he published, while Odd Aalen[0] has probably been listed first on every paper he's published. To prove that I'm not just making this up out of my ass, here[1] is a statement from the American Mathematical Society that talks about it. I'll quote the meat of it here: > In most areas of mathematics, joint research is a sharing of ideas and skills that cannot be attributed to the individuals separately. The roles of researchers are seldom differentiated (in the way they are in laboratory sciences, for example). Determining which person contributed which ideas is often meaningless because the ideas grow from complex discussions among all partners. Naming a "senior" researcher may indicate the relative status of the participants, but its purpose is not to indicate the relative merit of the contributions. Joint work in mathematics almost always involves a small number of researchers contributing equally to a research project. > For this reason, mathematicians traditionally list authors on joint papers in alphabetical order. An analysis of journal articles with at least one U.S. based author shows that nearly half were jointly authored. Of these, more than 75% listed the authors in alphabetical order. In pure mathematics, nearly all joint papers (over 90%) list authors alphabetically. Exceptions do exist, as alluded to by the "over 90%" number mentioned in the AMS statement. But, many of those are caused by transliteration artifacts (e.g. Author1 and Author2 are in alphabetical order in the language the paper was originally published in, but the English transliterated versions of their names are not). See this Math Overflow post for all the gory details: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/19987/math-paper-authors-order https://mathoverflow.net/questions/19987/math-paper-authors-... --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Aalen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Aalen [1]: http://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/CultureStatement04.pdf http://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/CultureStatement04.pdf
- pottertheotter 3y ago
  It’s also done that way in finance, accounting, and econ.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
brutusborn 3y ago
It’s because it’s the hardest field to bullshit. Everything is black and white and you can’t just make up fake data. On the converse, psychology and economics seem to have the most problems in terms of reproducibility and fraud. This is because they are the easiest to falsify, and their results are interpreted according to less precise epistemology. There’s no ‘Austrian school’ vs ‘Chicago school’ in maths (to my knowledge). Also, the general public isn’t interested in pure maths, so there are less incentives to fake data so you can get a nice press release, or so you can publish your new book, or so that the government bureaucrat will subsidise your ‘research.’
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  > There’s no ‘Austrian school’ vs ‘Chicago school’ in maths (to my knowledge). see Brouwer–Hilbert controversy ?
  - keithalewis 3y ago
    Neither Brouwer nor Hilbert claimed the other was wrong, only which axioms they preferred to use.
    - gnulinux 3y ago
      This is not true at all, Brouwer truly thought the original Aristotelian concept of the "law of excluded middle" was epistemologically unfounded. I would recommend his original paper introducing intuitionistic mathematics but it's very dense. You can refer to: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brouwer/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brouwer/ Later, he argued he found mathematical proofs of counterexamples of LEM. From above source: > “Intuitionist Reflections on Formalism” of 1928 identifies and discusses four key differences between formalism and intuitionism, all having to do either with the role of PEM or with the relation between mathematics and language. Brouwer emphasises, as he had done in his dissertation, that formalism presupposes contentual mathematics at the metalevel. He also here presents his first strong counterexample, a refutation of PEM in the form ∀x∈R(Px∨¬Px), by showing that it is false that every real number is either rational or irrational. See the supplement on Strong Counterexamples.
irjustin 3y ago
closely related but experimental physics tend to have some pretty high integrity with the sigma system.
fsckboy 3y ago
>the field with the highest integrity It may actually be professional golf, famous for players imposing penalties on themselves. I said professional golf, not your father-in-law's scorecard.

Interesting that the folks who wrote a proof based on the 4Chan user's post listed him as a first author. In all of my experience, Mathematics truly seems to be the field with the highest integrity.

AmericanChopper 3y ago

Imagine getting disciplined for plagiarising your paper from 4chan tho…

kkylin 3y ago

> Mathematics truly seems to be the field with the highest integrity. Mathematician here. I'd like to think we have high (not sure about highest) integrity. But I should also point out that the custom in the field is to list authors alphabetically by family name, and the paper in question (https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf) does not break with custom if you view "anonymous" as "family name"...

Paul-Craft 3y ago
I would think that "4Chan Poster" would be the "family name" here. Which, of course, would come lexicographically before most real family names.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  I would think they should have listed newfag as the author. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/newfag https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/newfag
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    Heh. "4Chan Poster, Newfag" would have been a great way to list the author's name. Perhaps ironically, the convention would then imply that newfag comes before oldfag. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oldfag https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oldfag
mkl 3y ago
> the custom in the field is to list authors alphabetically by family name This is only true in some fields of mathematics; many areas of mathematics do not follow this rule. (Also mathematician, and none of the papers I've been involved with have done the alphabetical thing.)
- ykonstant 3y ago
  Which field doesn't?
VyseofArcadia 3y ago
Once talking with my wife, biologist, I, mathematician, said something like, "I never get first author because my name is so late in the alphabet", and she stared at me like I had just sprouted a second head. Confusion and shock. That's when she had to sit me down and explain that first author is super mega important in her field, not just who is literally listed first.
- tejtm 3y ago
  errr... they are so hierarchically oriented they add in a different order of significant on the other end of the list of authors, so being first OR last is good
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    Same thing for TV show credits.
    - tejtm 3y ago
      that makes an unfortunate degree of sense
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jjgreen 3y ago
I'm a mathematician and some years ago wrote a joint paper with some philosophers, I suggested the paper but we all did comparable amounts of work on it: they insisted that my name was first (which was non alphabetically), it made me really quite uncomfortable as I imagined that others would assume that I was some kind of arrogant arse who had insisted on precedence.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Paul-Craft 3y ago

I've mentioned this before on here, but mathematics papers don't use the usual rules for author ordering. By convention, more or less the entire field has agreed that authors shall be listed alphabetically. So, Max Zorn probably got listed last on every single multi-author paper he published, while Odd Aalen[0] has probably been listed first on every paper he's published. To prove that I'm not just making this up out of my ass, here[1] is a statement from the American Mathematical Society that talks about it. I'll quote the meat of it here: > In most areas of mathematics, joint research is a sharing of ideas and skills that cannot be attributed to the individuals separately. The roles of researchers are seldom differentiated (in the way they are in laboratory sciences, for example). Determining which person contributed which ideas is often meaningless because the ideas grow from complex discussions among all partners. Naming a "senior" researcher may indicate the relative status of the participants, but its purpose is not to indicate the relative merit of the contributions. Joint work in mathematics almost always involves a small number of researchers contributing equally to a research project. > For this reason, mathematicians traditionally list authors on joint papers in alphabetical order. An analysis of journal articles with at least one U.S. based author shows that nearly half were jointly authored. Of these, more than 75% listed the authors in alphabetical order. In pure mathematics, nearly all joint papers (over 90%) list authors alphabetically. Exceptions do exist, as alluded to by the "over 90%" number mentioned in the AMS statement. But, many of those are caused by transliteration artifacts (e.g. Author1 and Author2 are in alphabetical order in the language the paper was originally published in, but the English transliterated versions of their names are not). See this Math Overflow post for all the gory details: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/19987/math-paper-authors-order https://mathoverflow.net/questions/19987/math-paper-authors-... --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Aalen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Aalen [1]: http://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/CultureStatement04.pdf http://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/CultureStatement04.pdf

pottertheotter 3y ago
It’s also done that way in finance, accounting, and econ.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago

brutusborn 3y ago

It’s because it’s the hardest field to bullshit. Everything is black and white and you can’t just make up fake data. On the converse, psychology and economics seem to have the most problems in terms of reproducibility and fraud. This is because they are the easiest to falsify, and their results are interpreted according to less precise epistemology. There’s no ‘Austrian school’ vs ‘Chicago school’ in maths (to my knowledge). Also, the general public isn’t interested in pure maths, so there are less incentives to fake data so you can get a nice press release, or so you can publish your new book, or so that the government bureaucrat will subsidise your ‘research.’

j16sdiz 3y ago
> There’s no ‘Austrian school’ vs ‘Chicago school’ in maths (to my knowledge). see Brouwer–Hilbert controversy ?
- keithalewis 3y ago
  Neither Brouwer nor Hilbert claimed the other was wrong, only which axioms they preferred to use.
  - gnulinux 3y ago
    This is not true at all, Brouwer truly thought the original Aristotelian concept of the "law of excluded middle" was epistemologically unfounded. I would recommend his original paper introducing intuitionistic mathematics but it's very dense. You can refer to: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brouwer/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brouwer/ Later, he argued he found mathematical proofs of counterexamples of LEM. From above source: > “Intuitionist Reflections on Formalism” of 1928 identifies and discusses four key differences between formalism and intuitionism, all having to do either with the role of PEM or with the relation between mathematics and language. Brouwer emphasises, as he had done in his dissertation, that formalism presupposes contentual mathematics at the metalevel. He also here presents his first strong counterexample, a refutation of PEM in the form ∀x∈R(Px∨¬Px), by showing that it is false that every real number is either rational or irrational. See the supplement on Strong Counterexamples.

irjustin 3y ago

closely related but experimental physics tend to have some pretty high integrity with the sigma system.

fsckboy 3y ago

>the field with the highest integrity It may actually be professional golf, famous for players imposing penalties on themselves. I said professional golf, not your father-in-law's scorecard.