Subject: AMS ethical guidelines From: Bill Richter Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 21:09:23 -0600 To: dmd1@lehigh.edu CC: njk4x@cms.mail.virginia.edu Nick Kuhn wrote on Dec 13: I think [the AMS ethical guidelines] is well written, and encourage everyone to read these at http://www.ams.org/secretary/ethics.html. And then follow them. So I read them, and I have an ethics question. I saw: * To correct in a timely way or to withdraw work that is * erroneous. Suppose there are many articles & books claiming some result (with earlier geometric proofs) has a trivial or immediate combinatorial proof, but none of these authors seem to know a combinatorial proof. Is that an error which must be corrected in a timely way? Perhaps not, because the result is known to be true, and because this rule seems to be about credit: The correct attribution of mathematical results is essential, both because it encourages creativity, by benefiting the creator ... So if the earlier geometric authors have moved on and don't complain their result has been trivialized, maybe there's no ethical issue. But the fact that the AMS ethical guidelines don't address the question of rigorous proofs is pretty interesting. I'm not making any ethical claims of my own, by the way. But I think that: Cutting edge researcher generally skip lots of steps while building the new field. I think it's unavoidable, and not actually bad: if you "dot every epsilon" while building a new field, it's hard to generate any momentum. And then it's for later researchers to decide whether or not to save the new field, by going back and rigorizing things, or letting the now-passe field slide into oblivion. That's OK with me. And the question of whether later researchers are allowed to rigorize some passe field would then be a social question (must we fund "dead-end" research?) and not an ethical question.