A Spectacular Rejection Letter for Einstein (but Unfortunately it's Fake)

Albert Einstein once received this spectacular rejection letter. Wow!

(Tip of the cap to Nelson Fernández.)

Update: Thanks to Sam Cohen for suggesting that I look up whether this letter is fake. It is.

A Very Short Paper Title

Wow, now that is a very short paper title: 'Q', just 'Q' --- which represents 1 divided by the attenuation factor (not modularity and also not Q).

Sociologist Jim Moody once submitted a paper called "Titles" to a journal. He was trying to get a one-word title, but that didn't fly with the journal, so he switched the title to something very long. (I e-mailed Jim to ask him for a link, which I will provide once I have it.)

The shortest title (in terms of number of words) that I have used in a paper is two. That occurs in http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/porterm/papers/multilayer_review-published.pdf this paper. It broke my previous record of 3 words. Now I need to try to write a paper with a one-world title. I don't think I'll ever get down to one letter.

Update: Jim sent me a .pdf of his paper. It turns out that the story I heard about the title being hugely long isn't true. Rather, his paper is called "Trends in Sociology Titles", which is accurate but doesn't have the same effect as going overboard.

Letters (and Numbers) and Butterfly Wings

Well, it turns out that one can find every letter in the English alphabet, as well as the numbers 0--9, imprinted in butterfly wings. Awesome!

P.S. I hope somebody appreciates the allusion in the title of this entry.

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

"Refereeing Nirvana"

My somewhat snarky letter to the editor has appeared among the letters in the February 2013 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Notice the reference to a certain bit of 90s music that I included? (Yeah, I know: It's the wrong decade. It works, ok?)

"In the Event of a Moon Disaster"

Wow. Take a look at this letter, which was written in case of a disaster regarding landing the first people on the moon. It was never used. This is an amazing read.

The Artists Respond

This letter from the band Greenday to an angry parent is (a) awesome and (b) right on the money. I approve!

(Tip of the cap to Eric Hwang.)

A Brief Comment on Oxford Elitism

I just sent the following letter to the Editor of Oxford Today in response to the editorial that appears on page 1 of this issue (page 3 of the .pdf file to which I link):


Hi,

I would like to comment on Editor Lofthouse's editorial in the TT2011 issue
of Oxford Today. He writes that "It [Oxford] cannot be expected to mend
inequalities that are deeply rooted in society." Really? I always thought
that one of the most important purposes of education---especially at
institutions like Oxford that think of themselves as elite---was to help do
exactly that. And in contrast to what Lofthouse suggests in his editorial,
I think that that *can* be done without compromising merit-based admissions. I find the attitude expressed in his editorial to be rather shameful, and I earnestly hope that most of my Oxford colleagues don't share it.

Sincerely,

Mason A. Porter
University Lecturer, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford

From the archives (or, how I once almost made it into Time Magazine)

When I was in grad school, I saw an article in Time Magazine about mathematics and mathematicians suddenly becoming sexy, so I decided to send a letter to the editor. My letter almost got printed.

It's worth noting that I wrote this letter before I started studying granular chains, for which one of the most important elements is the stiffness of one's balls. (Acoustic waves travel faster in stiffer materials.) Also, Techers will recognize a bit of this from back in the day...

Who says I'm not abrasive!?!

Bruce Charlton, a Reader in Psychology at University of Newcastle, published an article called "Why are scientists so dull?" in Oxford Magazine (5th week, MT 2008, issue 281). I couldn't find a link to it online, so I hope I can add that later. I just sent an extremely sarcastic response letter to the magazine's editor. It would be easier to "appreciate" [ :) ] my response if you read the original article first, so maybe I'll be able to find a link to it later. The article, by the way, refers to our dullness both in terms of being boring ("But we were never being boring.") and in terms of being stupid because extreme intelligence is apparently (in his view) selected against by the sheer years of training we're required to have to get a permanent position. (While I don't agree with that conclusion, he does have a valid point that many really smart people leave academia because it's such a pain in the ass to go through what it takes to get a permanent position.) Anyway, here is my snide response:


I read with great interest Dr. Charlton's essay about why scientists are so dull. While my successful perseverance through countless years of postgraduate and postdoctoral training indubitably indicates that I am too dim-witted to grasp his subtler points, I think I can manage enough coherent thoughts to figure out at least some of the points he's trying to make. For example, I assume based on his essay that his home field of psychology has no trouble hiring practitioners (or at least essayists) who are "awkward" and "abrasive" and perhaps does not have the unfortunate circumstance of encompassing too many people who are saddled with the unconscionable "personality attributes of conscientiousness and agreeableness?" Of course, my IQ is probably so low that I might be completely missing his point.

P.S. While it's hard for me to make unbiased comments about the quality of my science, I can assure Dr. Charlton -- as I hope my letter indicates -- that I am capable of offering no shortage of abrasiveness. I'd also like to think I'm pretty damned interesting, but I'll let other people decide that one. I haven't bothered to provide any evidence of that here, but then I suppose that's just something else that Dr. Charlton and I have in common?

Sincerely,

Mason A. Porter
University Lecturer
Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Mathematical Institute