Two more comments related to the ethics discussion........DMD ____________________________________________________________ Subject: for toplist: Social issues in mathematics From: David J Green Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:46:11 +0100 (MET) Re the comments by Bill Richter and Murray Gerstenhaber following Nick Kuhn's remarks on ethics: The discussion of social issues in mathematics reminds me of the interesting exchange of views about the interface between mathematics and theoretical physics just over ten years ago in the AMS Bulletin. Brief summary: we need brilliant insights motivated by nonrigorous physical considerations, and we also need painstaking mathematical proofs of results that are intuitively obvious from a physical standpoint. A credit / recognition system that acts as a disincentive to either is flawed. See the July 1993 and April 1994 issues, available at www.ams.org/bull/bull-pre1996.html Another issue of recentish history: can anyone recommend a social and mathematical account of the catastrophe theory episode, suitable for those of us who were at primary school in the 1970s? David J. Green _______________________________________________________ Subject: Re: three on ethics From: Bill Richter Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 22:05:28 -0600 From: "Claude Schochet" Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 c) The Guidelines were written with an eye towards establishing a standard that might be referred to when a truly awful ethics breach occurred- e.g. a PhD advisor stealing results from a student and then writing poison pen letters of recommendation for the student. Subtle questions such as Bill mentions were way beyond the scope of the document. That would be an important point: the AMS ethical guidelines don't cover our heated issues. None of us plagiarize. So maybe we're all ethical, because our ethics only cover extreme breaches. From: Murray Gerstenhaber Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 I agree with Nick Kuhn that there is a distinction between "social" issues in mathematics and "ethical" ones, although sometimes it may be hard to draw the line. If a result is established by difficult means and someone later claims in print to have a method which trivializes it but never in fact publishes the new approach, he or she may be keeping others from reanalyzing the problem. I think that was my distinction, not Nick's. But I wasn't thinking of someone claiming credit for something they couldn't prove. Rather, by saying something's trivial or well known, it doesn't require a proof. A new approach may lead to new insights not only about the original problem but also about others that might be attacked in a similar way. Does that cross the line from "social" to "ethical"? Not necessarily, with what I meant by social. Let me try again: I thought ethics (not morality) is just about what a community won't tolerate. Will we tolerate cutting edge researchers skipping lots of steps while building the new field? I sure thought we did. I don't see how the AMS guidelines (which don't mention proofs or rigor) say that's unethical. Is there an ethical obligation to allow later researchers to fix these gaps, after the cutting edge field has gone out of style? To publish papers, you have to do work that the community finds interesting. That's my social question.