Tag Archives: TImothy Gowers

state of foundational research

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I was catching up on some fun google-reader reading today but found with a depressing combination of content.

To be

The title of this post is taken from this math.SE question which boils down to:

Is it true? Is it mostly a dead field filled with quacks and not much going on?

The question was answered very kindly by Carl but there was also a comment with a link to another question on math.SE:

What are the issues in modern set theory?

which received a vibrant answer by Joel.

You should go and read it. It will make you feel all fuzzy in warm inside about studying set theory.

Or not to be

But then I continue reading.

And find mathbabe discussing an idea put forth by Harvard physicist Abraham Loeb in Nature to have ratings agencies for scientific theories.

And I find Tim Gowers discussing that last year’s scare is now reality — EPSRC has essentially cancelled pure math postdoc fellowships. (This was and is an embarrassment and failure of the leaders of the UK math community, really. How could hte major grant agency make such major policy changes without anyone noticing?)

And then I start to remember other posts.

And I remember Nassif Ghoussoub foreseeing the massive future cuts in foundational research in Canada.

And I remember James Colliander analyzing the same drift.

And I remember Frank Morgan’s post that might foreshadow a change at the NSF much akin to the change at EPRSC.

That is the question

How can we survive in such a climate?

postscriptum

On the one hand, Loeb’s idea for rating agencies seems mostly designed to identify “weak” fields and to eliminate those. On the other hand, his article opens with

Too many young physicists embark on projects without knowing the risks.

So while rating agencies would be stupid, I do like the idea to improve transparency for students. Is anybody thinking about that at all? Do we have transparent statistics about the number of research mathematicians, their fields, their activity etc? Do we have any idea about the number of future open positions in mathematics, their fields etc?

A comment on Tim Gowers’s blog

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I just left an awfully long comment on Tim Gowers’s blog. Thanks, François for mentioning the new post on twitter! Incidentally, it seems that my email is considered spam by Akismet these days, so it will most likely never show up on Gowers’s blog. Tim Gowers was very kind and took the trouble of going through his blog’s spam folder to retrieve my comment. On top of that he explained what I did wrong — I had too many links in my piece, silly me. Thank you! I’ve also added another comment from there where somebody asked me to clarify a few points. I wished there was a system for collecting my comments…

First comment

Thank you for continuing this discussion. I had feared it would stop after the pledge worked so well.

I must admit that I find myself wondering if the points you raise are going in the right direction.

I got rather uncomfortable when you described the idea of “Breakthroughs in Mathematics”. I don’t think that breakthrough papers are the problem — with your support, such a journal would likely be an instant success.

The problem is rather with average papers. The kind of papers that more and more young researchers find themselves writing not because they want to write them but because they must publish to find a job, to survive an evaluation etc. And of course, these papers must end up at reasonably high impact factor journals because that is what we are reduced to in job applications.

This, I think, is the main problem why the journal system appears broken — an inflation of papers that has devalued the concept of papers and hence of the only thing we consider in the research section of a mathematician’s CV.

I seems that the problem of scientific and mathematical research is not the production of results anymore. Your generation has done a great job at creating more and more PhDs that can write papers a plenty.

Instead of production, the problem is now attention, i.e., identifying the better papers amid the flood of average papers that nobody has time to read. As you described yourself, you were surprised that the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics actually contained a lot of interesting material that you didn’t even know about. Have you ever considered writing about interesting papers? And maybe even use http://www.researchblogging.org to make this known? Or perhaps use http://www.papercritic.com to rate the paper? (You could also do this anonymously.)

Instead of more papers (and hence more journals), I strongly believe that we need to focus on new ways of finding good research results and value this as research activity. In fact, after your suggestion for a MathOverflow+ArXiv publishing system, Claire Mathieu had suggested to only publish other people’s work — taking the idea of valuing the identification of good research to a wonderful extreme. There’s of course also the much larger debate going on regarding post-publication peer-review (such as f1000) which is precisely about this issue.

The second problem I see is what Michael Nielsen raises in Reinventing Discovery: the modularization of research. The sciences have already experimented very successfully with ways to modularize research from by now classic examples like Galaxy Zoo to more recent ideas http://whale.fm/ and http://www.FigShare.com.

We mathematicians have nothing to offer in this respect.

As you wrote yourself a while ago, the wonderful tricki has failed much like other wikis outside of Wikipedia (whereas other research areas have begun to value Wikipedia contributions as research).

I would even go as far as say that Polymath has failed (even though it was all about publishing papers and not disruptive in that sense). However, there still might be a chance to salvage it if we find a way to scale it away from top research to more average level research, more realistic problems or simply open-notebook science.

At the same time, a lot of young mathematicians “grow up” online. But they are still strongly discouraged not to experiment with communicating their mathematics online. Having attended Science Online 2012 last week, I was again shocked by the positive community the scientific online community offers.

The scientific online community embraces the younger generation. (Did you know that young graduate students write at the Scientific American’s blog network as equals of experienced scientists and professional science journalists?.) In mathematics, e.g., the MathOverflow community has worked very hard at discouraging even experienced graduate students from contributing (just ask some average graduate student). The scientific online community also offers protection and support by encouraging and developing safe systems for pseudonymous online activities.

As some comments have already indicated, we mathematicians are significantly behind in founding an online community that deserves the name. In particular, our academic societies do not take the online community seriously — which is somewhat bizarre given the current count of roughly 350 blogs in the research category on http://www.mathblogging.org.

Can we find a way to raise awareness of the potential for our community? Can we get to a culture where we value more and more experiments like the tricki, Polymath, mathoverflow until we find enough systems that actually work and everyone can participate meaningfully?

Finally, in a most likely vain attempt at getting back on topic: Can we find a way to use online journals in new ways, to modularize the mathematical research process instead of just copying a 300 year old idea to the web?

Oh dear, this has gotten far too long. I apologize.

Second comment

@Marcin Kotowski.

My wording regarding MO was unfortunate. I did not mean to imply graduate students are actively discouraged by the community. However, almost all graduate students I have talked to about this (here at Michigan but also at conferences and workshops) have given me precisely this impression — they do feel discouraged to participate. This has many reasons and for privacy reasons I don’t want to describe individual stories. There’s also the “problem” of MO having extraordinary users in some areas (such as my own), making it impossible to participate much (have you ever tried answering a question that Joel Hamkins knows the answer to?). Finally, there are those fields which are not well represented on MO in general, another hindrance for younger researchers.

I do think that MO is an amazing community in many, many ways and something where we are truly ahead of everybody else, really. But that doesn’t mean it’s without flaws.

The second part you quoted was much more general in nature, not just about MO but also other activities such as blogging, wikipedia, tricki, expository writing, reviewing other people’s papers, engaging with your community through social media etc.. From my own experience but also from conversations with other postdocs, it is clear that non-tenured folk are discouraged to do anything online — if you’re very good, then it is non-negative for your career.

I’ve personally heard the advice to “definitely not mention this on your CV”. It boils down to the old “you could have written a paper instead”-argument, really, and it is not going away while hiring committees effectively reduce applicants to impact factors of the journals they publish in. Again, as I said before, this is not about breakthrough mathematics but about “average” research.

Finally, here’s a link to a video from Science Online 2011 on “blogging in the academy” starting with an introduction from the perspective of MIT. It’s quite sobering even if it is only about blogging.

The recent publishing debate — a timeline

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In the last 3 weeks I have written a couple of drafts about the debate that finally hit the mathematical blogosphere through Tim Gowers’s blog (I don’t know how much he is aware of similar, ongoing discussions in the scientific blogosphere beyond his Michael Nielsen link but in case my one two readers are not, here are two you should add to your feed reader).

/begin{shamelessplug}
Unfortunately, the mathematical blogosphere is not visible enough to ensure that people actually see this debate — simply because there’s not enough visibility even if mathblogging.org tries to help with this a little.
/end{shamelessplug}

After getting stuck in one draft after another, I would like to try to writing something, rather than nothing: so let me start by giving an overview on all the posts that I have seen since Tim Gowers’s first post on the subject.

Establishing a time line

That’s a lot and one of the reasons why this post was stuck in the draft mode — there was always another post to read (Addendum on Nov 28: Igor Carron pointed out that he hadn’t read Tim Gowers’s posts). The great thing about wordpress is that all my drafts remain in the versioning system, including my rants — who knows if I ever find the time to revisit them…

Since I didn’t read them in chronological order, I won’t write about them in chronological order, but I’ll start with Tim Gowers’s posts.

Gowers’s posts

At first, I was disappointed at Tim Gower’s first post. He describes a Mathoverflow-for-papers idea. That didn’t quite blow me away, to tell the truth, but it’s ok — at least he suggests something and starts a discussion!

What annoyed me slightly more (but again, not greatly) was his list of potential objections. They are all non-points for me — and to Gowers himself if you read his arguments against them. But I felt they changed the discussion into a discussion of these points rather than a the original questions “what could a system look like?” and “how do we get there?”.

What you could take away from Gowers’s first post is the question “Why don’t we try a mathoverflow for papers?”.

The second post is a very different read. My problem with it is mostly the selection of comments he replies to — but I can hardly blame Tim Gowers for discussing only comments from people he takes seriously (well, I will, actually).

The new proposal isn’t really much different from the old one in practice, but it addresses said comments. The main change is to get rid of everything disruptive from the first proposal so that the service might be broadly accepted. The new concept is simply a service to check each others preprints.

For me, the most interesting part of that post is the list of people that Tim Gowers listens to.

Here’s what I found odd (and ultimately disappointing) about the posts.

One

The first post looked like a test balloon. Gowers seemed to say: “I’d love to discuss this topic, here’s an idea, I want to do this here rather than in print, and I want your input”.

But the second post indicates that he only wanted to get some feedback to tweak his specific idea — and he doesn’t want to listen to anyone he doesn’t already trust. If he had said that in the first place, I wouldn’t have been disappointed.

Imagine he would have said: “let’s do a polymath-like project — how many different ways can you think of to reinvent the publishing system?”, now that would have been something!

Two

I wrote that, at first, I was disappointed. The reason was the lack of inspiration — “yet another stackexchange site”, and that’s it.

What had given me hope was the afterthought. In the very last lines Gowers points to the single biggest problem I see in research: “real” research means “new” results in peer-reviewed journals which means that we continue to live in an intellectual mono-culture, valuing only one type of accomplishment.

As simple as his first proposal was, at least it had some disruptive potential! Just imagine if all these “not real research” papers — surveys, expositions etc — would wind up on top of the heap! That could actually question the leadership within our research community, a leadership that is solely decided upon the current publishing system and no other abilities.

But, alas, all the disruptive potential was eliminated in the second post. Instead, we’re left with a project that fixes what peer-review is supposed to accomplish. The community does for free what the publishers should organize and pay for: actual, in-depth peer-review.

Finally, however, I realized that it’s silly of me to expect Timothy Gowers or any other researcher of a similar position to suggest something truly disruptive. After all, the system worked and works for him — and similarly for anybody else he listens to.

Let me end by stressing that despite my criticism, I find it quite wonderful that Tim Gowers has yet again managed to have the mathematical blogosphere catch up with the scientific one on one more important debate.

Since the original post was getting longer and longer, I will post this now and continue later.