[1]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
In one hand, it shows the idea is really useful on its own.
And on the other hand, it shows that currently forgotten ideas have a chance to being rediscovered in the future.
For real world everyday problems normally it is an application of already solved theory or it isn't worth working on at all. We still need researchers to look at and expand our theory which in turn allows us to solve more problems in the real world. And there are real world problems that we pour enormous amounts of effort into solving despite lacking theory, but these areas move much slower than the much more common application of already solved theory and so are vastly vastly more expensive. (this is how we get smaller chip architectures, but it is a planet scale problem to solve)
If I want some novel ideas from a group of people, I'm going to give them the framework of the problem, split them into groups so that they don't bias each other, and say: go figure it out.
It’s a powerful skill to be able to try to solve things from first principles. And it’s a muscle you can strengthen.
It would be a bit silly to never look anything up, but it isn’t so black and white.
Only reading the existing literature is not good enough.
The capacity to create ideas is also something that needs to be practiced.
It's nice we have a common language that is mathematics, the science of patterns, to unify such things but it's still going to be a challenge because not everyone is fluent in all the various branches of mathematics.
It's even mind-blowing how many ways you can approach the same problem with equivalencies between different types of mathematics itself.
Edit: actually the paper was written in 1994, not sure what the "18 years" was referring to. But still, peer review existed and so did maths books... Even if the author can be excused somewhat (and that's already a stretch), peer reviewers should definitely not let this fly.
And what makes you less of a peer is not knowing the basics. And being so unaware of apparently not knowing the basics, and/or uninterested, that you don't bother to check something that is highly checkable.
This is why peer review exists. One can not known everything themselves. It's fairly common for CS paper submissions to reinvent algorithms and then tone down the claims after reviewers suggest that variants already exist.
in 1994?
I know how to find the area under the curve, but there's so much biology I don't know jack shit about. Back in 1994, It would have been hopeless for me to know the Michaelis-Menten model even existed if it had been relevant to my studies in computer science. That you can right click on those words in my comment in 2025 and get an explanation of what that is and can interrogate chatgpt to get a rigorous understanding of it shouldn't make it seem like finding someone in the math department to help you in 1994 was easier than just thinking logically and reinventing the wheel.
So did the author of the paper. The paper’s title itself mentions the area under a curve. It would not have been difficult to find information about how to calculate an approximation of the area under a curve in the library.
Some of us when learning calculus wonder if we'd been alive before it was invented, if we'd be smart enough to invent it. Dr. Tai provably was. (the trapezoid rule, anyway) So I choose to say xkcd 1053 to her, rather than bullying her for not knowing advanced math.
No, we have no proof of that. We just know that she published a paper explaining the trapezoidal rule.
(A) That approximation for 'nice' curves was known long before calculus. Calculus is about doing this in the limit (or with infinitesimals or whatever) and also wondering about mathematical niceties, and also some things about integration. (B) I'm fairly certain she would have had a bit of calculus at some point in her education, even if she remembered it badly enough to think she found something new.
Unless the victims are world-class..? (Because it's not entirely not self-inflicted)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981356
Shades of the strong-link weak-link dilemma too
Sounds like a pretty weak argument? I'm sure there are some good arguments for re-invention. But this ain't one of them.
Basically, re-invention for fun or to help gain understanding is fine. But when you publish a 'new' method, it helps to do a bit of research about prior work. Especially when the method is something you should have heard about during your studies.