There is a place in the real world for an engineer or a physician, but where does a PhD in Mathematics or Physics fits ? After graduation from the School of Exact Sciences a student will find it hard to get a job. So he tries to stay on in the Academy. As a full professor he will have to do research. Where does he get the research problem from? He reads papers of his own field. Then he writes a paper. His paper refers to other papers. Each one of these referred papers refers to more papers and so on. This orderly combination of related papers is called a “tree” in graph theory. Let us call “original” a paper in this tree if it refers to no paper because its author faced the problem outside the academy, in the real world. Theorem: The aforementioned tree has no original papers. Proof: A paper with no references will be rejected by a journal. I did not follow an academic career. Upon graduation the dean of my school recommended me for a job in du Pont de Nemours as an operations research practitioner. I worked for 30 years in industry to solve production programming problems employing optimization techniques, statistics, computation, and common sense. I consulted books to help me formulate a problem but no papers. I wrote hundreds of reports to supervisors, managers, and executive officers, but I did not write a single paper for a journal since it was useless in the production plant. In the nineties I lost my job, and reentered my alma mater as a professor. I was the only applied fellow among 55 pure mathematicians, and I found myself under the same pressure to write papers as my colleagues. So I chose the best project I faced in industrial concerns and sent it to a journal, but they reject it. Then I chose my second best paper and sent it to another journal and it was rejected too. Taken aback I told a colleague of my predicament, and he explained to me that a paper should refer to other papers, whilst mine referred to none. As a matter of fact my first paper referred to a book [1] an so did the second paper [2]. The first book served me to formulate a cutting stock problem in a rolling mill, and the second one I used on an inventory control problem in a chemical plant. As a consequence I did not try to publish a paper again for I inferred that the peer-reviewed system is mainly managed by theoreticians who check theorems, but have no inkling of what a real world problem is about. [1] R. Bellman and S. Dreyfus, Applied Dynamic Programming, Princeton U. Press, 1967 [2] William Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications, Volumen II, Wiley, 1971. Fabio Vicentini
Posted on: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 00:22:08 +0000
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