For most journals, editors did not necessarily need strong academic credentials. Their main duties were to check a paper's formatting and word count, find specialist reviewers for manuscripts that passed the initial screening, and decide whether to accept them based on the reviewers' opinions.
But that was only true of most journals.
For a journal like the Mathematical Annals, founded by Princeton, one of the world's leading institutions in mathematics, the editor-in-chief was usually a heavyweight in academia.
Its former editor-in-chief, Peter Sarnak, for example, was a leading scholar in number theory and the recipient of the 2014 Wolf Prize in Mathematics, an award recognizing lifetime achievement.
As the third editor-in-chief after Professor Peter Sarnak, Professor Freckles was somewhat less famous, a scholar who had only risen to prominence in recent years. Still, his ability was beyond question. Had he not already passed the age limit of forty, his work on differential manifolds might have given him a slim chance of competing for the Fields Medal.
Of course, the Mathematical Annals had not chosen him as editor-in-chief solely for his academic ability. There was another factor behind the decision.
With research into controlled nuclear fusion booming worldwide, interest in plasma physics had risen along with it. A few years earlier, the extraordinary effectiveness of the L-manifold in solving the Navier-Stokes equations and problems involving plasma turbulence had prompted countries around the world to direct more of their mathematics research funding toward partial differential equations and differential manifolds, encouraging their scholars to enter these fields.
Although the Mathematical Annals rarely chased trends, since Professor Lu's epoch-making lecture on the Navier-Stokes equations, neither partial differential equations nor differential manifolds had produced any particularly outstanding results. It was as though Professor Lu had single-handedly drained all the inspiration from both fields.
Thus, the