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Comment by FartyMcFarter | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it sort of deserves being made fun of. 18 years ago Google existed, surely you'd search for "area under a curve" before going through all the effort of writing a paper reinventing integrals?

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.

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Unfortunately quite common to see serious mathematical issues in the medical literature. I guess due to a combination of math being essential to interpreting medical data and trial results, but most practitioners not having much depth of math knowledge. Just this week I came across the quote "Frequentist 95% CI: we can be 95% confident that the true estimate would lie within the interval." This is an incorrect interpretation of confidence intervals, but the amusing part is that it is from a tutorial paper about them, so the authors should have known better. And cited by 327! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6630113/

Does it make you less of a peer to others who found it before ? At leas the author showed ability to think creative for himself , not paralyzed by the great stagnation like the rest of us.

Herself. Mary Tai.

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.

Even worse: you didn't just think so in private, but you decided to publish your 'great' discovery.

The blame is on the reviewers.

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.

> highly checkable

in 1994?

Calculus textbooks existed in 1994. It just took me 30 seconds to find “area under a curve” in the index of the one I own, and another 30 seconds to find the section on numerical integration, which describes the trapezoidal approximation.

So you already know the particular area of the larger topic of mathematics that you need to look for, you already have a textbook for that particular subject in your possession, meaning you don't need to go to the library and somehow figure out the right book to choose from the thousands the 510 section; you know what you are looking for exists, and then you aren't surprised you can find it?

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.

There is thing called "higher education". Ostensibly one of its chief purposes is to arm you with all that interconnected knowledge and facts that is useful in your chosen field of study. To the boot, you get all of that from several different human beings who you can converse with, to improve the scope and precision of the knowledge you're receiving. You know, "standing on the shoulders of the giants" and all of that stuff?

ostensibly.

> So you already know the particular area of the larger topic of mathematics that you need to look for

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.

I'd argue this is an argument against purely peer review, as her peers also weren't mathematicians.

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.

> Dr. Tai provably was.

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.

I mean, it's possible she reinvented the wheel because what she really needed in her life is for the math department to laugh at her, but that seems far fetched to me.

The "18 years" probably refers to the date since the linked blogpost was published, March 2007.

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