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Simple errors like these cover maybe 0.01% of the issues in a common math paper draft. Scrutinizing human review is required to catch "intellectual errors" such
by vortico 12y ago
Simple errors like these cover maybe 0.01% of the issues in a common math paper draft. Scrutinizing human review is required to catch "intellectual errors" such as introducing a concept before the reader is mentally prepared for it, or by offering an explanation in too much or little depth. During review, typographical errors (e.g. $10^12$) and "type-checking" errors (e.g. "r ∈ R vs. r ⊆ R") should be obvious to reviewers, so I feel it would be an extremely low priority to develop and apply a tool to fix these trivial issues.
And as much as I value good, clean code and style guides in programming, the TeX source of formulas are never read and usually edited by a single person, even in large collaborative projects.
- perlgeek 12y ago> Simple errors like these cover maybe 0.01% of the issues in a common math paper draft. And yet I wasted lots of time trying to make sense of papers containing such errors. So I would appreciate such a tool.
- jordigh 12y agoTerry Tao has a blog post about these "compilation errors": However, when, as a graduate student, one encounters the task of reading a technical mathematical paper for the first time, it is often the case that one loses much of one's higher reading skills, reverting instead to a more formal and tedious line-by-line interpretation of the text. As a consequence, a single typo or undefined term in the paper can cause one's comprehension of the paper to grind to a complete halt, in much the same way that it would to a computer. https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27/posts/TGjjJPUdJjk https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27/posts/TGjjJPUdJjk There's more context here: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s...