The December Issue of the Notices of the AMS

The December issue of the Notices of the AMS is now available online, and it includes letters written by Oded Goldreich, Boaz Barak, Jonathan Katz, and Hugo Krawczyk in response to Neal Koblitz's article which appeared in the September issue.

Despite this, the readers of the Notices remain the losers in this "controversy." Koblitz's petty personal attacks and straw man arguments appeared in the same space that is usually reserved, in the Notices, for expository articles and obituaries of mathematicians. It is from those pages that I learned about the Kakeya problem and about the life of Grothendieck (who, I should clarify, is not dead, except perhaps in Erdos' use of the word).

I find it strange enough that Koblitz would submit his piece to such a venue, but I find it as mind-boggling that the editors would run his piece as if they had commissioned Grothendieck's biographical article to a disgruntled ex-lover, who would focus most of the article on fabricated claims about his personal hygiene.

I can only hope that the editors will soon run on those pages one or more expository articles on modern cryptography, not as rebuttals to Koblitz's piece (which has already been discussed more than enough), but as a service to the readers.

And while I am on the subject of Notices article, let me move on to this article on how to write papers.

All beginning graduate students find the process of doing research mystifying, and I do remember feeling that way. (Not that such feelings have changed much in the intervening years.) One begins with a sense of hopelessness, how am I going to solve a problem that people who know much more than I do and who are smarter than me have not been able to solve?; then a breakthrough comes, out of nowhere, and one wonders, how is this ever going to happen again? Finally it's time to write up the results, and mathematical proofs definitely don't write themselves, not to mention coherent and compelling introductory sections. I think it's great when more experienced scholars take time to write advice pieces that can help students navigate these difficulties. And the number of atrociously badly written papers in circulation suggests that such pieces are good not just for students, but for many other scholars as well.

But I find that advice on "how to publish," rather than "how to write well" (like advice on "how to get a job" rather than "how to do research") misses the point (I am thinking of one of the few times I thought Lance Fortnow gave bad advice). For this reason, I found the first section of the Notices article jarring, and the following line (even if it was meant as a joke) made me cringe

I have written more than 150 articles myself. (...) I have never written an article and then been unable to publish it.

I think that this calls for an Umeshism in response.