I was recently asked to provide a quick opinion on a paper for a journal. One of the criteria the journal weighed heavily was whether or not the paper was "of broad interest to mathematicians in diverse fields".
Mathematics is so specialized at this point, that in my opinion, essentially zero papers meet this criterion. In recent years, I might list Yitang Zhang's work, or the discovery of aperiodic monotiles. Perhaps I am overly specialized myself, but I look at the titles of recent papers in non-field-specific mathematics journals, and I find no papers that look relevant to my work. Which is fine! Publishing papers that are big advances in their respective fields is great. But I would almost certainly be lying if I claimed that (in my opinion) any given modern paper in mathematics is of broad interest.
Is this a me problem?
Henry Segerman
npub10z…dtds5
2025-03-18 17:27:33 UTC
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