〈 Berger | Dillon 〉

I'm certainly not the first person to do this, but last month, after yet another spammy invitation to submit to a predatory journal, I decided to send them some junk. A quick Google and I found a site that generates nonsense maths papers. 1/ https://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/ 

I didn't want accidentally to commit myself to paying a fee, so I got the author's name to be randomly generated -- the result was S. Zhao -- and I replied, attaching the junk paper, and asking whether it was the research that they had referred to in their invitation. 2/

They replied telling me they were very glad to receive the submission and had accepted it for further peer review. Here, by the way, is a link to the article, "Legendre, Orthogonal Elements for an Independent Monoid", in preprint form. 3/ https://gowers.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/biostats-1.pdf …

Today I got back the happy news that the article was accepted. I also received galley proofs. They didn't ask for a source file, working instead from the pdf I sent, and introducing a large number of misprints. Here it is. 4/ https://gowers.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/ctbb.ms_.id_.000135.pdf …

I've written back to explain that there has been a misunderstanding, that I had at no point submitted Zhao's article, and that he had discovered an unfixable flaw in the argument: he needed r to be not just Thompson but strongly Thompson. I'll let you know how they react. 5/