Come on, does every cool thing need a stamp of approval by "experts" before publication?

"SQLite looks nice, but I would have double checked with Oracle engineers before announcing this as something novel"

Well, to some extent, yes.

Otherwise you’d end up like the MD who’ve “rediscovered” numerical integration (the trapezoid method) and got it published in the journal of diabetes or whatever.

> Otherwise you’d end up like the MD who’ve “rediscovered” numerical integration (the trapezoid method) and got it published in the journal of diabetes or whatever.

This was shocking because calculus is a required subject in American high schools, and this American doctor presumably went to American high school, not because the doctor didn't check in with mathematicians. Frankly, it would be equally shocking if the doctor had asked a mathematician if integration were a thing, because presumably a doctor is an educated member of society.

Nonetheless, even though it's highly embarrassing to the parties involved, with a little bit of self-deprecating humor if I was the doctor, I could tell people at parties that I, along with Newton and Leibnitz have been published on a foundational numerical integration method. ^_^

ha!

Calculus is not a requirement to graduate high school in America. Algebra, sure.

It’s surely a general education requirement in most colleges.

What's the harm in that ?

So mathematicians should be reviewing papers in the Journal of Diabetes? I think that the Journal of Diabetes should just stay in its lane.

I think the invitation is extended by sharing the blog post.

It's a blog post, not a peer-reviewed paper. And the tone certainly sounds to me like an invitation to mathematicians "Hey, we're amateurs who found this cool thing, can you tell us more about it?"

I understand what you mean, but how many great breakthroughs in history were where someone shared the foundation of an idea and then another formalized it?

I think it happens fairly often.

In the more mathematical realm in information theory, turbo codes came out of nowhere by people who were not experts in the field of FEC. Their efficiency far surpassed other methods of the time, to the point that their results in the conference paper were doubted. They didn't have any understanding at the time of why they worked well, they just published results.

Lots of physical phenomena start as simple observations that are later worked into theoretical frameworks. The photoelectric effect comes to mind.

"The initial goal of John Conway was to define an interesting and unpredictable cell automaton....

"While the definitions before Conway's LIFE were proof-oriented, Conway's construction simply aimed at simplicity without a priori aiming at the proof of automaton being alive." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

>The pattern looks nice, but I would have asked some mathematicians before announcing this as something novel.

The blog post serves that function.