> I couldn't help but laugh at this part. He proved a classic theorem in statistics and then precision engineered the actual submission to be roundly ignored.

He simply did not care:

“I am used to being frequently ignored by scientists from [top-tier] German universities,” he wrote in an email. “I am not so talented for ‘networking’ and many contacts. I do not need these things for the quality of my life.”

If he really didn't care, wouldn't it have been easier and more effective to only publish on the arxiv, and perhaps to tell people working on the problem about his solution?

He did publish it on arXiv

> Not knowing LaTeX, the word processer of choice in mathematics, he typed up his calculations in Microsoft Word, and the following month he posted his paper to the academic preprint site arxiv.org.

If you're old and don't know LaTeX? Probably not, especially since he was an editor with the journal he published in.

Sounds like a bullshit excuse. I don't understand why anyone would even argue that they intentionally do a poor job presenting their work because they somehow allege they are ignored.

The only reason why anyone would go through such pains to get ignored is if they intentionally want to be ignored.

And this does not make any sense, particularly in a "publish or perish" environment.

I on the contrary find it perfectly reasonable. Academic publishing has its own share of bullshit and I can well understand someone, specially a retired person, wanting to give up on that kind of prestige in order to save time and energy for actual science. For example, as far as I know, Grigori Perelman has not published the work that won him an offer of the Fields Medal in any journal.

It is clearly stated in the article that Thomas Royen just wanted to get published quickly, as he isn't an academic.

I sympathize, after getting my PhD I went into the private sector. I often have side projects that could turn into publications, but massaging something through the publications process is a part-time job itself, and there's definitely quite a bit of who-you-know that can muddy things up.

While it's hard to believe, there are entire fields where top journals can take 2 years to publish (no early publications, no culture of preprints, etc.) For example, in one subfield of EE where I once worked in mid oughts, the choice ws between an IEEE journal that took 2.5-4 yrs to publish or lesser known IET and online journals that published faster.

Such fields are few in 2017. But it's not implausible that in 2014 the only two quick forums in statistics he was aware of were Arxiv and lesser known journals.

There's entire trails of papers that cite each other on arXiv while they wait for a 1-2 year review for journal publication. It's crazy — the journal has in some regards become a formality necessary for career advancement, while the actual research in a field progresses in the form of postings on a preprint server.

> the journal has in some regards become a formality necessary for career advancement,

I think this is ever so slowly going away - the entire format of the journal is still a hangover from a print-only era and really needs to go away.

There are some good news: the NIH (medicine's US funding body) now allows preprints to be cited in grant proposals, one nail in the coffin of journals. See http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/nih-enables-investiga...

Are you saying that journals are going away in favor of unpeer reviewed preprints? That seems like a big step backwards.

Peer review mostly guarantees that the paper is not ridiculously wrong. It's a pretty small hurdle to clear and whether or not a paper passes peer review depends mostly on the mood of the reviewers. I have received completely contradictory reviews for the same paper.

Depends on the venue you publish in. One side effect of getting rid of peer reviews is that you need another indicator if a paper is worth reading, most of the time that's going to be author reputation. This means it's difficult for work from lesser known authors to get noticed (similarly to what happened here).

It is a step forwards. The important thing is to get rid of the journals, then new evaluation systems can rise from the ashes. The peer review is letting more and more crap through anyway.

The willingness to cite a preprint would seem in and of itself to be a form of peer review, no?

The great thing about the arxiv, though, is that you can submit the preprint early while the paper goes through review at a 'real' journal.

Review takes time... Unless you submit to your own journal... I'm surprised good friend didn't help with a better choice of journal, even a non top tier one.

> Makes me wonder if there's a proof of P=NP with ClipArt illustrations that's buried in the South Asian Journal of Mathematics.

For some reason, the gem implausibly hidden in an obscure Indian publication reminded me of Borges' The Secret Miracle [1], where God is hidden in a single letter of a single book in the Clementinum library. It also makes me wonder, how many talents are forgotten, how many revolutions hidden away collecting dust?

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Miracle

When I worked at the public library as a teenager, I proposed a "hundred dollar bill contest," where we would announce that there was a hundred dollar bill in one of the books. The head librarian got a horrified expression when she realized what I was proposing, and threatened to fire me on the spot.

So I wouldn't mess around with God. ;-)

I seem to recall that this has been tried and then hordes of people stormed the library, went furiously through the books and basically threw them on the ground, making a huge mess until the bill was found. Not exactly what the librarians had in mind.

Maybe this explains the time I found a $20 bill in a rather obscure library book.

The university library I worked in as an undergraduate had a $100 note inside a hard copy of someone's PhD thesis, put there by the author.

It was still there when I left, four years later. The secret of its existence was amazingly well kept by the staff - and nobody read the thesis.

Should have used a cheque

Why?

Presumably in order to notice when/if it's cashed?

I think it really takes some of the magic away for the recipient, and the wonder away from the author don't you think?

Sometimes it's nice to just put a bit of magic out in the world and let it be without running tracking on it.

In biology, the reason why there was a thirty-five-year gap between the publication of Gregor Mendel's classic paper on peas and the birth of genetics was that his 1865 paper was published in an obscure journal.

Great example.

It also seems to have been the case that when he became Abbot of his monastery in 1867 he ceased research.

The thing that's interesting to me is that he knew that this was a famous unsolved problem, knew that he was correct, wanted to take SOME amount of time to publish it, and then didn't care to get it out there at all.

I feel like my course of action would to be to send it to the guy at PSU he contacted and say "if you want to handle the publication bureaucracy, you can be second author."