Beating back fraud in mathematics

When people think of scientific fraud, the field of mathematics doesn't ordinarily leap to mind. Mathematicians don't publish very often, and face less pressure to 'publish or perish' than many academics. They don't often fight for spots in Nature or Science. There is less money involved, too: mathematicians have relatively small grants, require no expensive laboratories, and risk no pharmaceutical profits with their work. A faked mathematical equation is surely easier to spot than, say, a set of faked experimental data. Why would anyone publish a fraudulent mathematics paper?

But the field is not immune to ethical problems—in fact, it is unusually vulnerable to them. In October, a joint working group of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) released a scathing report on poor publishing practices in mathematics. They published two companion papers in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society taking a hard look at fraud and how to fight it.

I spoke with the head of that working group, Ilka Agricola, chair of the IMU's committee on publishing and a physicist and mathematician at the University of Marburg, in Germany. Here is our Q&A on the Foundational Questions Institute news site.

https://qspace.fqxi.org/articles/281/beating-back-fraud-in-mathematics