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RE: https://mathe.social/@tomkalei/117485825907188901
History: Church published the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem in spring 1936. Turing learned of it after finishing his own paper, added an appendix on the equivalence with λ-definability, and published anyway (Proc. LMS 1936). This is the essay's nightmare scenario, and Turing's paper is now the better-known one.
My own story: In September 2009, Herzog, Hibi and Hreinsdóttir posted "Binomial edge ideals" on the arXiv. In October, Johannes Rauh and I joined them for the second version. The first version already said: "Terai informed the authors that M. Ohtani independently obtained similar results for this class of ideals." In November, Ohtani posted his paper, already marked "to appear in Communications in Algebra". So we were first on the arXiv, and he was probably first at a journal. It never mattered. The two papers are virtually always cited together ("introduced in [HHHKR] and independently in [Ohtani]“).
Why assume that referees and hiring committees cannot see the history as it occurred?
@tobsboe
Replies (1)
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@tomkalei@mathe.social
Most mathematicians don't really know the history of any theorem, anyway.
Just before the turn of the millennium, I attended a history talk in a summer conference on topology.
I don't remember everything, but there is one thing I remember vividly, and probably imprecisely.
According to the speaker, what we now know as Tychonoff's Theorem is due to Čech.
And the Stone-Čech compactification is due to Tychonoff.
In reality, however, the way I see it, everybody was thinking about these and related problems at that time, and each of them improved on the others' results.
In any case, I want to say that, with or without AI, if you prove something "important", there is no guarantee that you will get "due credit" after you die or even while you are alive.
@tobsboe@machteburch.social
Open ##5233942