At the highest point of Korea, early April 2023.
Please note this when you email me. Thank you.
"We do not 'risk' sliding down toward such standards; we have reached them." (S. Lang)
This is an essay in which I try to express my fear about the establishment of a culture of publishing, where no one is willing to take responsibility for the correctness of mathematics, and readers finding mistakes in published proofs are stamped as outcasts, because they are deemed to target the reputation of authors and journals.
A summary appeared in the June/July 2010 Notices of the AMS, Letters to the Editor.
As a respectable senior puts it: "... don't be so hard on the mathematical careerists. They're not as smart as you and must be held to a lower standard."
You can read here the follow-up article that was (finally!) published.
[NOTE: the photo above is what the picture in that article was cut out from. It was goddam cold on that day, what may suggest that it is not mainly my intrinsic unfriendliness that made me look that way. I of course submitted the full view, hoping that it would be interesting to show, but it was the typical example of how hard it is to imagine what those at the other end are intending...]
For more recent photos, you may check out my flickr page.
15224980, Thistlethwaite's achiral 15 crossing knot. Here I announced the construction of amphicheiral knots of all odd crossing numbers >15.
A 21(?) crossing knot for which Morton's conjectured inequality fails. (See here for explanation.)
My attitude toward my webpage is (and it therefore looks) like this of many other mathematicians: I would love to have a much nicer one, but spending time on it is one of my last priorities. In particular, while I update this page from time to time, some parts may still be hopelessly outdated.
