[Todos] The Argentine chapter of the academic show

[fabio vicentini]

Buenos Aires, June 26, 2012

Dear Colleague:

Subject: Theorem

 There is a place in the real world for an engineer or a physician, but
where does a PhD in Mathematics fits? After graduation from the School of
Exact Sciences he will find it hard to get a job. So he tries to stay on in
the Academy.

 As a full professor he will have to do research. Where does he get the
research problem from? He reads papers of his own field. Then he writes a
paper. His paper refers to other papers. Each one of these referred papers
refers to more papers and so on. This orderly combination of related papers
is called a “tree” in graph theory. A paper is a  “leaf”  in this tree if
it refers to no paper because its author has faced the problem outside the
academy, in the real world.

 Theorem: The aforementioned tree has no leaves. Proof: A paper with no
references will be rejected by a journal.

 I did not follow an academic career. Upon graduation I went for a job at
du Pont de Nemours as an operations research practitioner. I worked for 30
years in industry solving production programming problems by means of
optimization techniques, statistics, computation, and common sense. I
consulted books to help me formulate a problem but no papers. I wrote
reports to supervisors, managers, and executive officers, but I did not
write a single paper since they are useless in the production plant. In the
nineties I lost my job, and reentered my alma mater as a professor.

 I was the only applied fellow among 55 pure mathematicians, and I found
myself under the same pressure to write papers as my colleagues. So I chose
the best project out of seventy projects I faced at industrial concerns and
sent it to a journal, but they reject it. Then I chose my second best paper
and sent it to another journal and it was rejected too. Taken aback I told
a colleague of my predicament, and he explained to me that a paper should
refer to other papers, whilst mine referred to none. As a matter of fact my
first paper referred to a book an so did the second paper. The first book
was an ancillary to formulate a cutting stock problem in a rolling mill,
and the second one I used on an inventory control problem in a chemical
plant. After this I did not try to publish a paper again for I inferred
that the peer-reviewed operation is mainly managed by theoreticians who
have no inkling of what a real world problem is about.

 Fabio Vicentini
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