Nothing particularly exciting happened over Christmas. If anything made Lu Zhou happy, aside from his new fireplace, it was the reply from Mathematical Annals.
In the letter, Professor Saen, the new editor-in-chief of Mathematical Annals, politely informed him that the two papers he had submitted some time ago, on the proof of the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis and the Hyperelliptic Curve Analysis Method, had been successfully published.
As they had previously discussed, the two papers, totaling fifty-one pages, were published as a special issue for the mathematical community.
With the reviewer, Professor Faltings, revising his opinion and the two papers officially appearing in print, the preprints that had piled up on arXiv flooded toward journals covering analytic number theory, complex analysis, and even general mathematics like water bursting through a dam.
Everyone hoped to get their papers through peer review as quickly as possible.
Failing that, they at least had to beat the people who had produced more advanced results to publication.
After all, this was much like researching mathematical conjectures. Once a stronger result had passed peer review, been published, and entered a journal database, a weaker version or conclusion of the same conjecture no longer merited publication unless it offered an innovative method. During peer review, it might be rejected outright with the words "not worthy of publication," without even a chance to revise it.
Thus, in their rush to publish first, many PhD students desperate to graduate, along with some lesser-known scholars, chose low-quality journals famous for their fast acceptance rates. These journals were quite something themselves: to collect a few more publication fees, they even opened dedicated "review channels" for these papers.
The affair led to several journals being named and fiercely criticized on MathOverflow. The uproar even caught the attention of several prominent figures in mathematics, who