This is essentially irrelevant to the content of the post, but it's amusing to me that he casually mentions submitting to JAMS as if its acceptance were a mere formality.
> With hindsight, some of my past rejections have become amusing. With a coauthor, I once almost solved a conjecture, establishing the result with an "epsilon loss" in a key parameter. We submitted to a highly reputable journal, but it was rejected on the grounds that it did not resolve the full conjecture. So we submitted elsewhere, and the paper was accepted.
> The following year, we managed to finally prove the full conjecture without the epsilon loss, and decided to try submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the previous literature!
Uh, care to explain? I have several colleagues that stopped submitting to journals once they reached full professor. They only submit papers from their students for the benefit of their careers. First-author papers, not so much.
Touche, I used to work in pure probability where that ridiculous Hardy-Littlewood rule used to cause all sorts of problems, but now work in statistics, where it is no longer an issue.
To be clear, the colleagues I am referring to mostly work in math phys. They are sole author papers, but I refer to them as first author, since that is the language I am now accustomed to.
And no, the culture in maths vs. theoretical stats is not really that different at the end of the day, and the latter is most assuredly like other STEM fields. I still collaborate on pure math papers (geometric analysis and PDEs mostly) from time to time, and it isn't really a different head space. My name is typically later in the alphabet, so I never even think about the alphabetical ordering.
