On 6/7/05, Andrew Venier avenier@venier.net wrote:
How does one, in the course of documenting what is known on a topic, "accidentally find out something that wasn't known before"?
Eh, it's quite possible, .. for example in making a example for a math article you might stumble on something somewhat novel, but often in mathematics we can empirically confirm the truth of something in a way which doesn't assert POV. So you might say that NOR is less important in articles about math. ... but at the same time, it's not like placing something in an article gets people to test the proof, so NOR is still potentially valuable there because the majority of 'great new mathematical ideas' are actually wrong. :)