From time to time academic journals undergo an interesting process of fission. Typically as a result of some serious dissatisfaction, the editorial board resigns en masse to set up a new journal, the publishers of the original journal build a new editorial board from scratch, and the result is two journals, one inheriting the editors […]| Gowers's Weblog
The adaptive-triggering policy. On page 12 of a document put out by Imperial College London, which has been very widely read and commented on, and which has had a significant influence on UK policy concerning the coronavirus, there is a diagram that shows the possible impact of a strategy of alternating between measures that are […]| Gowers's Weblog
A couple of months ago, I can’t remember precisely how, I became aware of a book called How I Wish I’d Taught Maths, by Craig Barton, that seemed to be highly thought of. The basic idea was that Craig Barton is an experienced, and by the sound of things very good, maths teacher who used […]| Gowers's Weblog
The following story arrived in my email inbox (and those of many others) this morning. Apparently a paper was submitted to the Taylor and Francis journal Dynamical Systems, and was accepted. The published version was prepared, and it had got to the stage where a DOI had been assigned. Then the authorS received a letter […]| Gowers's Weblog
One should of course be concerned when anybody is detained for spurious reasons, but when that person is a noted mathematician, the shock is greater. Six academics have recently been detained in Turkey, of whom one, Betül Tanbay, is due to become vice president of the European Mathematical Society in January. I do not know […]| Gowers's Weblog
This is a bit of a niche post, since its target audience is people who are familiar with quasirandom graphs and like proofs of an analytic flavour. Very roughly, a quasirandom graph is one that behaves like a random graph of the same density. It turns out that there are many ways that one can […]| Gowers's Weblog
First, I’d like to thank the large number of commenters on my previous post for keeping the discussion surprisingly calm and respectful given the topic discussed. In that spirit, and to try to practise the scientific integrity that I claimed to care about, I want to acknowledge that my views about the paper have changed […]| Gowers's Weblog
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the decision taken by the New York Journal of Mathematics. Further update, added 15th September. The author has also made a statement. I was […]| Gowers's Weblog
This post is to announce that a new journal, Advances in Combinatorics, has just opened for submissions. I shall also say a little about the journal, about other new journals, about my own experiences of finding journals I am happy to submit to, and about whether we are any nearer a change to more sensible […]| Gowers's Weblog
It has been in the news recently — or rather, the small corner of the news that is of particular interest to mathematicians — that Maryanthe Malliaris and Saharon Shelah recently had an unexpected breakthrough when they stumbled on a proof that two infinities were equal that had been conjectured, and widely believed, to be […]| Gowers's Weblog
While Polymath13 has (barring a mistake that we have not noticed) led to an interesting and clearly publishable result, there are some obvious follow-up questions that we would be wrong not to try to answer before finishing the project, especially as some of them seem to be either essentially solved or promisingly close to a […]| Gowers's Weblog
There is widespread (even if not universal) agreement that something is deeply wrong with the current system of academic publishing. The basic point, which has been made innumerable times by innumerable people, is that the really hard parts — the writing of papers, and the peer review and selection of the ones to publish — […]| Gowers's Weblog
I have now completed a draft of a write-up of a proof of the following statement. Recall that a random -sided die (in the balanced-sequences model) is a sequence of length of integers between 1 and that add up to , chosen uniformly from all such sequences. A die beats a die if the number […]| Gowers's Weblog
It has become clear that what we need in order to finish off one of the problems about intransitive dice is a suitable version of the local central limit theorem. Roughly speaking, we need a version that is two-dimensional — that is, concerning a random walk on — and completely explicit — that is, giving […]| Gowers's Weblog
I hope, but am not yet sure, that this post is a counterexample to Betteridge’s law of headlines. To back up that hope, let me sketch an argument that has arisen from the discussion so far, which appears to get us close to showing that if and are three -sided dice chosen independently at random […]| Gowers's Weblog
I now feel more optimistic about the prospects for this project. I don’t know whether we’ll solve the problem, but I think there’s a chance. But it seems that there is after all enough appetite to make it an “official” Polymath project. Perhaps we could also have an understanding that the pace of the project […]| Gowers's Weblog
I’m not getting the feeling that this intransitive-dice problem is taking off as a Polymath project. However, I myself like the problem enough to want to think about it some more. So here’s a post with some observations and with a few suggested subproblems that shouldn’t be hard to solve and that should shed light […]| Gowers's Weblog
This is a quick post to draw attention to the fact that a new and very interesting looking polymath project has just started, led by Timothy Chow. He is running it over at the Polymath blog. The problem it will tackle is Rota’s basis conjecture, which is the following statement. Conjecture. For each let be […]| Gowers's Weblog
This post is principally addressed to academics in the UK, though some of it may apply to people in other countries too. The current deal that the universities have with Elsevier expires at the end…| Gowers's Weblog
I have just received an email from Sergey Kitaev, one of the three combinatorialists at Strathclyde. As in many universities, they belong not to the mathematics department but to the computer scien…| Gowers's Weblog
I am very happy to say that I have recently received a generous grant from the Astera Institute to set up a small group to work on automatic theorem proving, in the first instance for about three y…| Gowers's Weblog
A few days ago I received an email from Brian Conrey, who has a suggestion for a possible Polymath project. The problem he wants to see solved is a little different from the problems in most previo…| Gowers's Weblog
This post is addressed at anyone who is voting in Great Britain in the forthcoming elections to the European Parliament and whose principal aim is to maximize the number of MEPs from Remain-support…| Gowers's Weblog
It’s taken longer than we originally intended, but I am very happy to report that Advances in Combinatorics, a new arXiv overlay journal that is run along similar lines to Discrete Analysis, …| Gowers's Weblog
Four years ago I wrote a post about an awful plan by Leicester University to sack its entire mathematics department, invite them to reapply for their jobs, and rehire all but six “lowest perf…| Gowers's Weblog