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Randomly Generated Math Article Accepted By 'Open-Access' Journal
call -151 writes "Many years ago, a human-generated intentionally nonsense paper was accepted by the (prominent) literary culture journal Social Text. In August, a randomly-generated nonsense mathematics paper was accepted by one of the many low-tier 'open-access' research mathematics journals. The software Mathgen, which generated the accepted submission, takes as inputs author names (or those can be randomly selected also) and generates nicely TeX'd and impressive-sounding sentences which are grammatically correct but mathematically disconnected nonsense. This was reviewed by a human, (quickly, for math, in 12 days) and the reviewers' comments mention superficial problems with the submission (PDF). The references are also randomly-generated and rather hilarious. For those with concerns about submitting to lower-tier journals in an effort to promote open access, this is not a good sign!"
The obvious next step beyond randomly generated journal submissions is, of course, randomly generated Slashdot comments.
Bravo, good sir! Another milestone!
You are not too far from the truth.
Almost any paper presented at a conference will be intentionally opaque. If it wasn't, many people that heard the presentation would quickly write their own version and submit it to a bunch of journals hoping to claim the result as their own.
The second problem occurs because the authors have been living with the results for months working out the last few details. All the intermediate steps are obvious to them because they have been thinking about them for so long. They forget that the intermediate steps are not obvious to everyone else.
The third problem is that everyone is writing for the experts in the field. People are afraid to write the intermediate steps because of peer pressure. If they write them down, they think their peers will laugh at them and conclude their work must not be worth much.
When I was a grad student, my adviser always wanted me to read his papers. From my point of view they were a bunch of disjoint unrelated paragraphs. The few times I was able to figure out how and why he went from one paragraph to the next, I gained more insight than I did from a year of taking classes. I used to tell my peers that all the true knowledge was between the paragraphs.
This is massively a failure of the editor and the referee. I suspect the editor didn't look at it all and the referee did a quick superficial job. One big question is who the referee was. One typical method of finding an appropriate referee is to look in the references. However, in this case, since the references are hilariously bogus:
"[7] "Q. Hausdorff and C. W. Turing. Advanced Combinatorics. Guyanese Mathematical Society, 2001"
I don't think you are going to find a Turing or Hausdorff alive and replying to email requests to referee these days! I can't believe a mathematically literate editor would look at the references (to find a referee) and not immediately realize that this is nonsense. So I suspect the editor asked someone else who had recently submitted something to the journal to write a quick report, perhaps in the spirit of mutual back-scratching. Perhaps that referee also did not notice that this was nonsense and did not look at the references either. Or perhaps the editor did a quick review instead of sending it out- the chance that two reasonable math people, no matter how overworked with their own tasks, would not notice that this was totally bogus I would hope is small.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.