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Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

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Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#31

Post by hatmatrix »

newswasboring wrote: post #27
vilhelm_s wrote: post #22

In the next issue, the journal published a bunch of letters noting that she had rediscovered the trapezoid rule. https://kconrad.math.uconn.edu/math1132s20/handouts/taicomme... Mary Tai herself also replied and explained the background to the paper a bit more: > While a doctoral candidate working on my dissertation at Columbia University in 1981, I needed to calculate total area under a curve. During a session with m…

I was really on the author's side till I read these responses. Initially in my head it was just a case of misunderstanding or ignorance, but through her letters she has made clear that she thinks it is significant enough. This is borne out by her tone which is palpatably aggressive and contradictory at some points. She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself. Also, no effort…

> And I don't understand why people would need a citation instead of just saying its calculated using the trapezoidal rule.

They didn't know the trapezoidal rule.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#32

Post by [deleted] »

Niksko wrote: post #24
klingon78 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something that could be applied in general mathematics? If so, is it truly novel and worthy or a trivial derivation? I’m asking because I don’t know, not rhetorically. I agree that someone shouldn’t be publicly made fun of in-general for sharing something novel and non-trivial that others didn’t already know, and if it highlights a problem in inadequate reviews, maybe it should’ve been presented to the journa…

This is kind of where grand parent's thesis (that the paper is in fact novel and useful) falls down. I'd be stunned if the concept of integrating an unknown function that needs to be guessed based on measurements taken at irregular points in time hasn't been studied rigorously from a generalized mathematical point of view. What such study would likely do (that a medical treatment would not) is discuss tradeoffs of di…

[deleted]

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#34

Post by opaque »

newswasboring wrote: post #27
vilhelm_s wrote: post #22

In the next issue, the journal published a bunch of letters noting that she had rediscovered the trapezoid rule. https://kconrad.math.uconn.edu/math1132s20/handouts/taicomme... Mary Tai herself also replied and explained the background to the paper a bit more: > While a doctoral candidate working on my dissertation at Columbia University in 1981, I needed to calculate total area under a curve. During a session with m…

I was really on the author's side till I read these responses. Initially in my head it was just a case of misunderstanding or ignorance, but through her letters she has made clear that she thinks it is significant enough. This is borne out by her tone which is palpatably aggressive and contradictory at some points. She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself. Also, no effort…

> She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself.

She didn't name it after herself, the users did:

> collegues ... began using it and addressed it as "Tai's formula"

As is typically the way with eponymous scientific works, people citing the work add the author's name e.g. Maxwell's equations or Higgs' boson. The author doesn't typically declare "I have discovered X, which I shall call ${self.name}"

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#35

Post by Robotbeat »

stuartbman wrote: post #26

I think it's important to note why the 75 citations isn't just 75 dummies who also haven't heard of integration. If you're writing a diabetes paper and want to use integration for your analysis (even if you are fully aware of its background), you'll be forced to justify your approach and defend it's applicability to diabetes. Far easier to say 'as per Tai et al...' and take it as given. You see this a lot- 'we used […

Sounds like it’s the reviewers who need to know basic calculus.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#37

Post by Robotbeat »

learnstats2 wrote: post #15

The author of this blog post is wrong to say this is 'integration'[0], and is also later wrong to say it's the 'trapezoidal rule'[1]. It seems to me that it's diagnostically useful to have a standardised method for estimating the area under the curve, rather than everyone inventing their own method. [0](since you don't know the whole function, you only know point estimates at particular moments in time) [1] (trapezoi…

It most certainly is still (numerical) integration.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#38

Post by airhead969 »

jack_riminton wrote: post #11

Tangental point here, but I find Medical student's relationship to Science quite fascinating. For instance there's a trend for medical students to believe less in evolution than other biology students EDIT: reference to it in this story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/21/religion.highe...

What frightens me is that osteopath magical thinkers (DOs) are allowed to practice medicine in the US just like MDs. They're glorified chiropractors!

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#39

Post by Robotbeat »

I appreciate the dig at fellow physicists for not recognizing group theory. As a physicist myself, I’m somewhat impressed by the power of many mathematical abstractions which have not yet utilized. Although I think this Avenue of discovery (searching in mathematics textbooks for things to apply to physics) is now fairly well-mined.
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