Sunday, January 22, 2006

How much damage can be caused by a peer reviewer having a bad day?

Check out this cool article! You will find some hilarious reviews for award-winning papers authored by Dijkstra, Codd, Shannon, etc.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's just beautiful. I love the "no one will notice it there" in reference to a Letter to the Editor. -David Molnar

Anonymous said...

Unless one writes a paper on a solution to a well known problem using a well known menthod (or a tiny variation thereof), one is likely to get these kinds of review. That is the sad fact of "peer-review." It can be very frustrating.

Andy D said...

The response to Turing's paper voices a sentiment that's still alive among many mathematical people--why worry whether an infinite problem is decidable or not (/in P or not), especially when we have yet to get ballpark estimates of the circuit complexity of natural finite problems? Associated with this is distrust of asymptotic results, worst-case analysis, etc. The same kind of dismissals are still used, even though a constitutively different positive project is still non-forthcoming.

Unknown said...

Simply the best laugh I've had all week. The Turing review is truly inspired.