Written: Dec. 18, 2025
Granted, Math is fun! But trying to publish it in a so-called "peer reviewed journal" is worse than having a root canal. Of course, some of us, of a certain age, who reached their asymptotic promotion, have the luxury of sticking to the arxiv, as I do with all my papers only authored by myself and my beloved junior colleague, SBE, but the papers that I write in collaboration with students and other not-yet-fully-promoted collaborators still have to go through this ordeal.
So you send it to a peer-reviewed journal, and after a few days you get an automated desk-rejection slip, just signed "Transactions of the American Mathematical Society".
The paper that I am talking about is this masterpiece by Eric Rowland and Jason Wu. It is more interesting and significant than most of the papers published in TAMS including those by the learned members of the rather extensive editorial board.
These members of the editorial board are bad mathematicians, if they can't appreciate the beauty of this gem. In fact, they are not mathematicians at all, since mathematician is an extinct species. They are just narrow-minded specialists (like all of us), who can only appreciate papers in their very narrow field of expertise, at best 5 percent of mathematics.
So they may be good, say, non-commutative ring theorists, or analytic number theorists, or algebraic combinatoricists, etc. etc., but they are not mathematcians.
But, worse than being a bad mathematician, is being a bad person. If you are an editor of a peer-reviewed journal, who desk-rejects submissions, you are not a nice person. You ruin someone's day. Who are you to decide that it is of "insufficient mathematical interest"?
So this is a plea to all you editors, and members of editorial boards, who reject papers without a fair trial, don't do it anymore! Resign immediately! You may think that it looks good on your CV to be an editor of a journal, especially a "prestigious" one, but at least in my book, regardless of your possible eminence in your very narrow specialty, I despise you as a person, you are not a nice guy!