xamuel (u/xamuel) - Readit News

xamuel commented on Looks like it is happening math.columbia.edu/~woit/w... · Posted by u/jjgreen

mmooss · 4 days ago

Thanks for responding! Have you ever tried to get access to for-pay reference sources such as JSTOR? I haven't found a way other than going in-person to libraries, which is not practical.

xamuel · 2 days ago

On rare occasions where the other methods don't yield anything, I have friends in academia who have access and who are happy to help out. But yeah, it's totally medieval that this knowledge isn't freely available to the world.

xamuel commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026) · Posted by u/david927

xamuel · 5 days ago

I'm working on arranging talks and poster presentations at various conferences/seminars to spread knowledge of my latest academic paper, "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points". In the paper, among other things, I argue that (we should define species in such a way that) for any organism in any species, either the species is made up almost entirely of descendants of that organism, or else the species is made up almost entirely of non-descendants of that organism. This is a funny property because most people who hear about it fall into one of two camps, those who say it is obviously true, and those who say it is obviously false!

The paper in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05274 (published in the Journal of Mathematical Biology)

xamuel commented on Looks like it is happening math.columbia.edu/~woit/w... · Posted by u/jjgreen

mmooss · 17 days ago

Congratulations. How did you do it? And how do you get access to resources such as reference products, journals, etc. that typically require institutions with budgets?

xamuel · 5 days ago

Sorry for not seeing your message until now. Journals, at least in mathematics, generally don't require you to have a university affiliation, so as long as the paper is good on its merits, you can get it in, though I don't know to what extent it might be more of an uphill battle due to implicit peer reviewer bias etc. Re: reference products: one generally scraps what one can together through a combination of arxiv.org, Anna's archive, or emailing the authors.

Deleted Comment

xamuel commented on Looks like it is happening math.columbia.edu/~woit/w... · Posted by u/jjgreen

moregrist · 17 days ago

Peer review isn’t the issue here. His comments are about Arxiv, which is a preprint server. Essentially anyone can publish a preprint. There’s no peer or other review involved.

xamuel · 17 days ago

This is a common misconception. People without academic affiliation (based on their email address) require someone to vouch for them before they can submit to arxiv. And papers submitted to arxiv (with or without affiliation) are reviewed, and many are rejected.

xamuel commented on Looks like it is happening math.columbia.edu/~woit/w... · Posted by u/jjgreen

wmf · 17 days ago

I assume hep = high energy physics in this context. PI = professor who received a government grant.

Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. This already happens to some extent today when the stakes are lower.

xamuel · 17 days ago

>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality.

I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all) and just got a paper accepted in the top math biology journal [1]. But granted, it took literally years to write it up and get it through. I do really worry that without academic affiliation it is going to get harder and harder for outsiders as gates are necessarily kept more and more securely because of all the slop.

[1] "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf

xamuel commented on Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf] gwern.net/doc/iq/high/smp... · Posted by u/gurjeet

chao- · 18 days ago

This brings to mind the childhood of John Stuart Mill:

- Learned Greek starting age three.

- Was studying Plato at age six.

- Studied Latin starting at age eight.

And more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography

I guess it helps that he had Jeremy Bentham hanging around his house from an early age.

xamuel · 18 days ago

J.S. Mill's autobiography is a fascinating read. He spends quite a lot of it discussing his early childhood, explaining that in his opinion he was not particularly special, rather, it was his father who pushed him to all those accomplishments. His father sheltered him from other kids so he was not aware that his accomplishments were unusual!

xamuel commented on Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points arxiv.org/abs/2602.05274... · Posted by u/xamuel

xamuel · 19 days ago

"The main axiom we introduce [...] states that for any organism in any species, either the species contains at most finitely many descendants of that organism, or else the species contains at most finitely many non-descendants of that organism."

Posted by u/xamuel 19 days ago

Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points arxiv.org/abs/2602.05274...

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