Любопытная дискуссия на рассылке по алгебраической топологии. Несколько цитат:
"It is my opinion that the field of academic mathematics
would suffer terribly if the general public began to understand
that we publish lots of mistakes. [...]
The reason that errors are accepted is that,
contrary to public impression of mathematicians
as people who are absolutely rigorous and always correct,
in the academic discipline the mathematicians
who earn the greatest prestige and renown
are those who have the deepest ideas,
not those whose work is absolutely reliable. [...]
[Mathematicians] frequently publish papers
in which not only some details are wrong
but sometimes the main result is wrong...
И из другого письма в той же дискуссии:
Years ago a postdoc from New York visited Bangor. He told me that as a
student he was asked to give a seminar on a paper. He found he could not
understand it. His supervisor, initially sceptical, finally could not
understand it either. Eventually the student asked the author who
responded: "I knew the result was true, so I just wrote something down. "