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I happened to come across an old thread, "What counts as crackpottery?" and the above question came to my mind. The story is well known that he developed his results on his own without access to standard mathematical notation, and so when he began corresponding with mathematicians at universities they all (with the notable exception of G. H. Hardy) dismissed the work as nonsense.
Does anyone know what that correspondence looked like? Aside from using non-standard notation, did it have elements of crackpottery which contributed to it getting dismissed?
Sort of apropos to this question, I recently read of an experiment where someone submitted a novel, a recent (I think) prize winner to various publishers pseudonymously. It was rejected by all of them, including the publisher who had published the actual novel.
Does anyone know what that correspondence looked like? Aside from using non-standard notation, did it have elements of crackpottery which contributed to it getting dismissed?
Sort of apropos to this question, I recently read of an experiment where someone submitted a novel, a recent (I think) prize winner to various publishers pseudonymously. It was rejected by all of them, including the publisher who had published the actual novel.