Re: beating up Ayn Rand


William December Starr wrote:

> Does the needed "help of an insider" include getting the paper's
> foot in the door, so to speak, so it doesn't just get consigned
> unread (or at least not seriously examined) to the Crackpot Pile?

No, but it wouldn't hurt. Even better is to get the paper vetted and
any mistakes cleaned up, because a lot of mathematicians will just quit
reading when they hit an error past their tolerance bars. That was what
happened in the sad case of Kurt Heegner, who *did* get published, but
didn't have a friendly thesis advisor to help him clean things up.
Moreover, the style was peculiar, a little mumbo-jumboish, and the
mathematical background, based in Weber's Lehrbook, old-fashioned for
those times (less so now!) Hence, a proof of a major conjecture
(Gauss's conjecture) was not accepted as valid until after he died,
which is a real pisser. But seeing errors simply switched off people
like Chowla; it wasn't up to the standard of presentation they were
used to. The referee as I understand did help clean some stuff up, but
in the end, not enough, I guess.

Anyway, a high school teacher proved Gauss's conjecture, a major
conjecture, in the early fifties. He publised it in a respected math
journal. And he *still* did not get credit for it until after he was
dead, and Stark and Birch showed his work was essentially correct.

If he's lived, he would have seen "Heegner point", "Heegner number",
"Heegner's thorem" go into the vocabularly of mathematics.

.

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