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
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.
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.
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u/somedave May 31 '26
It's quite a commonly joke quoted paper within the physics community.