Grigori Perelman is but one mathematician. In addition, he is a true genius whose accomplishments aren't subject to debate, not least because they are in a field where there is little room for debate about scholarly accomplishments, so he has little reason to worry about his academic stock. To top it all off, he genuinely doesn't care about his academic stock, as he demonstrated when he declined to accept the Fields medal and did not attend the congress at which it was to be given out. --Christian Nelson On Feb 8, 2008, at 4:44 PM, Gilles Frydman wrote:
There is an amazing precedent in the field of mathematics publishing, demonstrating that if you build it, they will come! On their own.
Look at the story of Grigori Perelman, who received the Fields Medal (the highest prize in mathematics) for solving the Poincare Conjecture. He published his solution to this 100 years old problem in 3 articles over an 8-months period in 2002-2003. He specifically published the 3 articles ONLY on arXiv, the open-access repository of e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics. (for background information on arXiv.org: http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/blurb/)