Mathematics desk
< December 5	<< Nov \| December \| Jan >>	December 7 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Mathematics Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 6

Amateur Mathematician/Publishing

So, I've always had an interest in mathematics, but college was not for me. I've spent a lot of time self-studying, but I also devote time to following out my own ideas. I have a few ideas that I think are novel enough and capable of being developed into something worth publishing, so I've been typing them up and working them out. Which brings me to my questions. First, is there a way to get enough journal access to actually do real research without being attached to some academic institution (for example, I can look up and read papers using Google, but I don't have any method of extensively researching a topic)? And, second, in a few months, if after everything is worked out and written up, if I still believe it is something worth submitting, how would I go about that? Specifically, how do I avoid having my submission ignored due to having no formal education. To be very clear, lest I be associated with a certain type of personality, nothing I'm doing is world changing, nor a rambling attempt at a well known open problem, nor anything else "crankish". If it is important, I'm mainly working out some technical ideas related to ordinal analysis and logic - they are not in any state that it would be easy to lay them out here, at the moment, however.24.3.61.185 (talk) 05:57, 6 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The first part of your question is about researching your bibliography without university access to academic journals. Well, it's hard, but mathematics is probably the least worst field because many authors put preprints on arXiv, so you can access a good proportion of them without having to pay ~$20 per piece. (Or, well, use other methods...) As for the how-to, lots of people have been busy producing software (see. e.g. Scopus, WebOfScience etc.) but honestly I have never seen anything that beats GoogleScholar on keywords plus following citing/cited by papers.

For the second part, being an outsider is in itself not a big deal (editors will not research you and find you have "no formal education", and reasonable editors would not reject a piece just because the author is not affiliated with a research institute). However, outsiders are much more likely to either (1) produce inadequate research or (2) misunderstand the journal submission process.

In (my field of) physics, (1) often means either failing to look at the state of the art for your problem (applies to math too) or having a bad methodology or experiment design (probably does not apply directly to math). (I have seen a conference presentation where the first question was "how does your work differ from [reference published twenty years ago]" and the correct answer was "it does not". Don't be that presenter, and don't be the reviewer that passed the abstract.)

(2) is that writing a scientific article is much harder than one would expect at first. Not only does it follow a rather rigid structure with lots of conventions that can be quite esoteric, but more importantly writing makes you think of new research. You will likely find while writing that your work, once presented in paper form, shows obvious gaps and shortcomings, or immediate avenues for improvement, that you will want to correct, and will themselves lead to more reflection when written out etc. Again from my experience in physics, one of my papers was initially a fairly simple report of the results of a tricky-to-run experiment (a bit similar to the Michelson-Morley experiment whose scientific value lies less in the observed result and more with the care to methodology and error bound control). Iterating over the drafts took about half a year though, as we never really run out of analysis ideas based on the raw data, and at the end the paper did have some novel ideas in the modeling part. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 10:19, 6 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

George Bergman was published in Mathematics Magazine as a young teenager, so it does happen occasionally. From what I've gleaned from this and a few other examples, here are a few guidelines: Find a journal that fits well with what you're interested in. Become a regular reader to learn what kind of writing style and format they expect, and to prove (to yourself at least) that you can at least follow some of the articles before asking them to print one of yours. The biggest potential problem is that you're repeating work that's already been published, so having an unusual topic will help. Another big potential problem is that you don't actually have enough expertise to know what constitutes valid results. This will almost always be the case if you're claiming to have a solution to a famous unsolved problem. (Is there even one case where a famous unsolved problem was solved by an amateur? I can't think of any.) --RDBury (talk) 12:56, 6 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Kurt Heegner. John Z (talk) 09:42, 7 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As far as acquiring references is concerned, you should also try any local (public or university) libraries -- talk to a research librarian, see what resources are available. They may be able to help you both with searching the literature for relevant work and with getting access to individual papers. You can also try reaching out directly to the authors ("Dear Professor so and so, I am an amateur mathematician and I've been doing some reading in [your field]. Your paper [title] looks very interesting, but the journal is asking $40 to look at it; do you by any chance have a digital version you could share with me?" or whatever).

About how to avoid having it be ignored, I think basic polish (using LaTeX professionally, writing in an appropriate tone and style) is enormously important. If you live near a research university, you might consider hiring a late-stage mathematics PhD student to perform a pass over it for you as an editor. (The best way to approach that would be to send an e-mail to the department administrator.) --JBL (talk) 15:01, 6 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think you can expect near-100% response rate when asking authors for papers, or at least well above 50%. Personal experience: I have cold-emailed ~5 different corresponding authors and always got a reply; usually for details of experimental procedure or supplier contact, which requires more work to answer than just hitting reply and attaching a pdf.

The problem is to not ask the same person multiple times, when you don't know all papers you want from the get-go. Sometimes, you think paper X contains some very important information, but when you read it that part is actually is cited to paper Y, which itself gives the information but says it took it from paper Z which you must then read, etc. Or you may do your reading by waves, so that you find out months after reading paper X that you need paper Y as well. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 16:18, 6 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, everyone who replied, this is extremely helpful! I had never considered emailing authors.:-)24.3.61.185 (talk) 03:59, 8 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

See also here. And note that most Elsevier journals don't require authors to stick to the journal's guidelines for typesetting and formatting of references, this is done by the typesetters after acceptance of the paper. Count Iblis (talk) 16:07, 10 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]