Some thoughts on math politics

Occurs to me maybe should be more helpful for others who come across this blog and need a decent synopsis of state of acceptance of my research, as far as I know, and I have a good example I think to illuminate.

Back January 5, 2015 put a post where I show a method for finding integer solutions in general for:

(x² + ay²)(u² + bv²) = p² + cq²

Which looked like something on which I could try out something I decided to call a Binary Quadratic Diophantine iterator or BQD Iterator for short.

An example from the post shows a solution I found:

(x² + 2y²)(u² + 3v²) = p² + 11q²

And here are some possible solutions for the variables:

x = 1, y = 2, u = 2, v = 2, p = 10, q = 2.

And what makes the story informative is I was answering a question I saw on some math site, so I put up my general solution. Later I checked back and saw it had been deleted by the site.

And I'm NOT a mathematician which I gleefully and routinely note. In my world you take a correct answer, but in my experience in the world of math people it's not so simple to them. They often clearly care about the source. Who found it.

And I do wonder, but maybe some of them really see it as defending the mathematical field? From that perspective maybe even a correct answer can seem worthless in comparison to letting someone they see as the wrong person gain credence?

But it's like with that example, does established math world have an answer? I don't know. I looked over that math site, which is linked to on the original post and you can too. I didn't see one. There were several attempts though.

Problem is these are esoteric things! Who actually needs the answer?

If someone does? Then my solution will get picked up.

But for that to happen would probably need to be some practical problem in the real world which needs it.

But yeah to me shows the problem--I can put things up, and even show to math people, but can't make them acknowledge it. Ok.

Regardless I have answers, which found myself! And can put up my findings on this blog which draw attention from around the globe.

And guess could be comforting to others to get more information, so last year according to Google Analytics blog had visits from people from 68 countries. And I even checked cities this time, and visitors were from 423 cities. To me seems kind of abstract really.

So yeah maybe a bit frustrated with that behavior of math people not properly acknowledging results of mine I think are important and valid but if you get mad? They use that against you. Problem is the behavior is the opposite of what I think most people would expect which actually protects it. If you challenge you sound wrong! The faith in the mathematical community is so solid. Ok.

And why bother if the information is publicly available regardless, so people who do need it? Can find and use it. The math politics is just kind of weird to me and hard to explain which is why I like the example above. You can see a real world example of a research finding, simply rejected, leaving a question unanswered at the math site source, while you can see the answer on this blog.

But that kind of covers situation and to me this post is for those people who might wonder. And short answer is, I can't make math people acknowledge these results. And wouldn't if I could. It's that simple.


James Harris