172
Letters to the Editor
A
ugust
2013
N
otices
of
the
AMs
839
The Common Intellectual
Property of Humankind
With respect to David A. Edwards’s
article “Platonism is the law of the
land” (Notices, April 2013), in which
he advocates that mathematical re-
sults should be patentable: Can one
really imagine a world in which some-
one must obtain a license and pay
royalties every time (s)he uses the
Fundamental Theorem of Calculus or,
for that matter, negative numbers?
—Steven H. Weintraub
Lehigh University
shw2@lehigh.edu
(Received March 19, 2013)
Sustainability or Collapse?
It appears to many observers that
humanity is already moving into
“ecological overshoot and collapse”.
If they are right, then Simon Levin’s
nice overview in “The mathematics of
sustainability” (Notices, April 2013)
needs a much more ambitious, inter-
disciplinary agenda.
The most outstanding application
of mathematics to the ecological tra-
jectory of modern civilization may
still be the famous Limits-to-Growth
study of the 1970s. This study (see
Limits to Growth—The 30-Year Up-
date, 2004) uses nonlinear dynamical
systems that encode critical feedback
and feedforward loops among a hand-
ful of global variables (population,
resources, food, industrial output,
pollution). It uses the methodology
of scenarios that has been applied to
great effect in climate modeling.
The Limits-to-Growth business-
as-usual scenario, which has held up
remarkably well, suggests that not
only are we well into ecological over-
shoot but that some form of collapse
could be imminent—starting within a
decade or two. If so, mathematicians
could make a major contribution by
studying the chaotic aspects of these
nonlinear systems, especially how
they could be controlled to achieve a
soft landing (= sustainability).
Mathematicians, especially those
with expertise in complexity and
scientific computing, could be part
of interdisciplinary teams, similar to
inherits the disciplinary culture of
computer science, not of mathemat-
ics—causes me to doubt the validity
of this premise.
There are two reasons why the
computer science literature is more
prone to errors, including serious
errors in important papers, than is
mathematics. First, the tradition is
to publish mainly in conference pro-
ceedings, not in journals. Authors
write under deadline pressure and
often submit their papers within
hours (literally) of the deadline. Re-
viewers are also hurried—they each
have to read and evaluate a couple
dozen papers in the course of a few
weeks.
In the second place, in computer
science and related fields it is ex-
pected that successful researchers
write papers at a frenetic pace, au-
thoring or (more often) coauthoring
a large number of papers each year.
As I wrote in my article “The uneasy
relationship between mathematics
and cryptography” (Notices, Septem-
ber 2007), “Top researchers expect
that practically every conference
should include one or more quickie
papers by them or their students.”
The heightened publish-or-perish
pressures, which are much worse
than in mathematics, contribute to
quality control problems. Some ex-
amples of these problems can be
found at http://anotherlook.ca.
Cryptography and computer sci-
ence are not the only fields that
seem to have more problems than
mathematics with major errors in
important papers. Grcar states that
“biomedical and multidisciplinary
journals are recognized for exem-
plary corrective policies.” This is
questionable. The reader will find
a much less sanguine viewpoint in
the article “Lies, damned lies, and
medical science”, by David H. Freed-
man (The Atlantic, November 2010).
—Neal Koblitz
University of Washington
koblitz@uw.edu
(Received March 29, 2013)
On “A Revolutionary Material”
The history of the discovery of quasi-
crystals is not stated correctly in
Radin’s article [“A revolutionary ma-
terial”, by Charles Radin, Notices,
March 2013]. Actually the mathemati-
cal theory came before the experi-
mental discovery of quasicrystals.
The mathematical model for a
3-dimensional quasicrystal with ico-
sahedral symmetry was first pub-
lished by my father, P. Kramer, and
his student R. Neri in the article “On
periodic and nonperiodic space fill-
ings of Em obtained by projection”,
Acta Cryst. Sect. A 40 (1984), no. 5,
580–587. This paper was submit-
ted on November 5, 1983, before
Shechtman’s experimental result,
which earned him the Nobel Prize,
was published.
In contrast, the paper by D. Levine
and P. Steinhardt mentioned in the
article was written and submitted
afterwards. The review by M. Senechal
(MR0768042) of the Kramer-Neri
paper states this very clearly.
I want to make two points here.
Firstly, the mathematical theory of
quasicrystals predated the experi-
ment. Secondly, the paper by Levine
and Steinhardt is not at all the “initial
report” on the theory of quasicrys-
tals. It is unfortunate that the official
press release of the Nobel Prize Com-
mittee contains the same historical
and scientific inaccuracies.
—Linus Kramer
Universität Münster
linus.kramer@uni-muenster.de
(Received March 14, 2013)
Errors in Papers: Math vs.
Computer Science
In “Errors and corrections in math-
ematics literature” (Notices, April
2013), Joseph Grcar accepts as an
axiom that “There is no reason to
think…mathematicians make mis-
takes less often” in their published
work than researchers in other
branches of science. My experience in
my own field, cryptography—which,
although it involves a lot of math,
