Terence Tao on Nostr: With hindsight, some of my past rejections have become amusing. With a coauthor, I ...
With hindsight, some of my past rejections have become amusing. With a coauthor, I once almost solved a conjecture, establishing the result with an "epsilon loss" in a key parameter. We submitted to a highly reputable journal, but it was rejected on the grounds that it did not resolve the full conjecture. So we submitted elsewhere, and the paper was accepted.
The following year, we managed to finally resolve the conjecture, and decided to try submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the previous literature!
(This paper was also submitted elsewhere, and accepted; and I have subsequently published in that highly selective journal since. Being an editor myself, and having had to decline some decent submissions for a variety of reasons, I find it best not to take these sorts of rejections personally, and move on to other journals, of course after revising the paper to address any issues brought up by the rejection.) (2/2)
The following year, we managed to finally resolve the conjecture, and decided to try submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the previous literature!
(This paper was also submitted elsewhere, and accepted; and I have subsequently published in that highly selective journal since. Being an editor myself, and having had to decline some decent submissions for a variety of reasons, I find it best not to take these sorts of rejections personally, and move on to other journals, of course after revising the paper to address any issues brought up by the rejection.) (2/2)