Has anyone counted the percentage of published math papers of new proofs/old results?
That strikes me as very hard to even define. Many papers include a re-proof of some existing fact, to reduce dependence on checking references, to demonstrate a different approach, or just in ignorance of previous work. But I don't think you'd want to count something as a new proof/old result paper just because lemma 42 had been published in the Proceedings of the Odessa Mathematical Society thirty years ago. Conversely, a reproof of existing results will almost always involve proving new lemmata. So to make this determination you need to decide what a 'main result' is, or perhaps give fractional credit. But even that would require determining whether two proofs or theorems are equivalent, which is not at all obvious... Charles Greathouse Analyst/Programmer Case Western Reserve University On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 9:16 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Rich made the following comment re Science.
From: rcs@xmission.com d) Confirming studies are not normally publishable.
Q: How does Mathematics treat papers which are new proofs of old results?
We all know about Euler & Gauss & multiple proofs, but how are modern mathematicians treated in the published literature when they attempt to publish new proofs of old results?
Has anyone counted the percentage of published math papers of new proofs/old results?
BTW, I strongly disagree with Boltzmann's comment re "leaving elegance to the tailors"; part of the progress of modern math/science is to convert PhD thesis results into undergraduate homework or lab exercises. This is the only way to condense the incredible amount of material that a budding mathematician/scientist must learn before getting into new territory.
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun