alt Hacker NewsMost good scientists work hard to prove results to themselves before going public.
Peer review is then done _in private_ before publication as a check on quality and significance.
Retracting a paper is pretty embarrassing. And not considered science as usual.
Replies
rpdillon • yesterday at 12:56 PM
Retraction is after publication and peer review, no?
The greatest proof ever written by man, Andrew Wiles' FLT, was published with a flaw before being retracted and reworked. It's _completely_ normal in mathematics to find flaws in the argument. That's what peer review in mathematics is _for_.
Besides which it's not clear if these papers are considered published or preprint since they appear in no journal, so it's not really a retraction.
It's also very very normal to post preprints on Arxiv before peer review, so it's not the case that mathematics is kept private during review.