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Do you mean originate and write the paper? Or do you mean just maybe understand the general essence of the paper's title, and understand major contributions af
by nmrm 12y ago
Do you mean originate and write the paper?
Or do you mean just maybe understand the general essence of the paper's title, and understand major contributions after spending some time reading the paper?
If the former, well... yes. That's probably true for almost all significant research, especially in mathematics.
If the latter, I think you're probably wrong. And that's not to trivialize the work presented in the paper; if anything, the contrary -- the paper's actually quite well-written.
- patio11 12y agoI meant "write" in the usual sense as it is applied to academic research.
- nmrm 12y agoCounting up the number of people who could've written a given non-anonymous paper is pretty unheard of in academia afaik. The answer is usually politely assumed to be "exactly the number of authors". I've certainly never seen this behavior. So I'm not sure your answer is actually at all clarifying. Probably, and this is just a guess, neither Simons or Sullivan claim they could've written the paper alone. And it's certainly impossible to write essentially the same paper without plagiarizing. So probably there are either zero or two people who meet the "could've written this paper" criteria. So, why didn't you just say "there are more than zero/two billionaires who read HN"? Seems less round-about.
- noahc 12y agoYou're over thinking this. He means a handful + 3.