From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/9504 Path: news.gmane.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: selinger@mathstat.dal.ca (Peter Selinger) Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: Real sets Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2018 21:16:42 -0400 (AST) Message-ID: References: Reply-To: selinger@mathstat.dal.ca (Peter Selinger) NNTP-Posting-Host: blaine.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: blaine.gmane.org 1516235809 1534 195.159.176.226 (18 Jan 2018 00:36:49 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@blaine.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:36:49 +0000 (UTC) Cc: categories@mta.ca (categories@mta.ca list), george.janelidze@uct.ac.za (George Janelidze) To: ross.street@mq.edu.au Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Thu Jan 18 01:36:44 2018 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtp2.mta.ca ([198.164.44.40]) by blaine.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.84_2) (envelope-from ) id 1ebyBq-0007Ht-Hd for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Thu, 18 Jan 2018 01:36:22 +0100 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:59033) by smtp2.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.80) (envelope-from ) id 1ebyE7-0006EE-FR; Wed, 17 Jan 2018 20:38:43 -0400 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ebyCq-0007ND-Dw for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Wed, 17 Jan 2018 20:37:24 -0400 In-Reply-To: Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:9504 Archived-At: Dear George and Ross, thank you! I am aware of many papers that contain mistakes, but this is the first time in my memory that somebody has publicly retracted an already published result. There should be more of this. You are to be commended. A few years ago I published some papers in a physics journal, and I was surprised to discover that the physicists have a completely different system from what we have in mathematics and computer science. A typical physics journal has several types of submissions. The most basic one is a research paper; this is refereed in a similar way to how we do it in math (except much faster). Another submission type is an erratum for an existing paper. The most interesting type of submission is a comment on somebody else's paper. If you submit such a comment, then roughly speaking, the editor will first send your comment to the author of the paper you are commenting on. The author is invited to write a response to the comment. The editor will then send your comment along with the author's response, if any, to an anonymous referee. If the referee and the editor are satisfied, both the comment and the response will be published. There will be a link from the original paper to the comment and vice versa, so that people can readily find out what has been said. (The actual procedure is even more complicated; see e.g. here: https://journals.aps.org/pra/authors/comments-physical-review-a) I did a quick search and found that there seem to be about 25 comments and 25 errata for every 1000 papers published in Physical Review A. I am sure that this system has evolved to accommodate the scientific method. I.e., what physicists typically publish is the result of an experiment. Somebody else might replicate the experiment, and might get the same result (thereby strengthening the evidence), or a different result (thereby weakening it). In either case, this activity is considered completely legitimate, even encouraged, as it adds to the total body of evidence. In math, of course, we don't usually do experiments, and our results are supposed to be immutable. Nevertheless, I sometimes wish there were a more efficient and tractable process by which errors in the literature could be reported and corrected (not for the purpose of embarrassing the authors, but to maintain and improve the quality of the literature). Maybe in the future, some math journals will adopt a process similar to the physics one. I think this would be a great idea! Best wishes for the new year, -- Peter Ross Street wrote: > > Dear Colleagues > > We are sorry to say that Examples 5.5 and 5.6 in our paper > > [Real sets, Tbilisi Mathematical Journal 10(3) (2017) 23--49] > > are not examples of series monoidal categories afterall. > Our attempts to accommodate them are leading to interesting directions which will take awhile to finalise. > For now, in a new arXiv version of ``Real Sets'', we have pointed out that those Examples, and the dependent Examples 5.12 and 5.13, are in error. > Nothing else in the paper depends on those examples. > > George Janelidze > Ross Street > [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]