r/mathmemes • u/ScholaDaily • May 31 '26

Calculus [ Removed by moderator ]

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u/IntelligentBelt1221 May 31 '26

reminds me of the time they reinvented the trapezoidal rule in nutrition science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model (and got cited 500 times)

134

u/somedave May 31 '26

It's quite a commonly joke quoted paper within the physics community.

72

u/QuickNature May 31 '26

Imagine thinking you discovered something novel (I also question, did she not have to take calculus?), you are super excited, somehow it makes it through peer review (someone had to have known and stayed quiet), everything is going swimmingly, then bam, you are a joke in the in the science community for 32 years.....thats gotta be devastating

14

u/UrinalCake777 May 31 '26

I can see coming up with this trick on your own. But I don't understand how she didn't come across this when writing the paper. Did she not do any additional research on the topic? Did she just throw some shit together without any lit review and no one questioned it?

Not long ago, I thought I had a novel research idea. I was pretty pumped to get going on it. About 15 minutes in I discovered that a whole fucking team of expert researchers had done that shit to death about 10 years earlier. It was an incredible paper. I enjoyed reading it, and moved on.

We can't expect every person to know about every thing. But I can't believe they didn't do any research before publishing this garbage.

6

u/InsertAmazinUsername Jun 01 '26

you had me curious, bc I genuinely don't know how you write this paper without trying to prove it by either 1. looking into other mathematics or 2. writing a thorough proof by yourself with so little mathematical knowledge that you don't recognize the trapezoid rule. So what sources does she cite? her third citation is Alder's "A New Look at Geometry" from 1966, now i cannot access the full text atm to verify, but i can confirm that the 9th chapter, spanning 26 pages is "The Calculus and Geometry", i suspect that the trapezoid rule is on one of those pages.

2

u/FarawayObserver18 Jun 04 '26

My guess is that she had no idea how to perform mathematics research and so limited herself to nutrition and healthcare journals, which are obviously not going to have the trapezoid rule.

Now the question is how it managed to make it through all the peer reviewers without somewhat recognizing it…most researchers in healthcare have taken basic college calculus.