I report here
a few
selected episodes with the purpose of giving an idea of the hostile
behavior from some influential category theorists that I have suffered
throughout the past years, and of their consequences.
For episodes concerning Peter Johnstone and Martin Hyland see
here instead.
Experiences with F.
William Lawvere
F. W. Lawvere, on the occasion of the PSSL in Cambridge in honor of the
60th birthday of Peter Johnstone and Martin Hyland in 2009, remarked in
his talk, in front of an audience of 150 people (and without alerting me
in advance), that he needed to correct a mistake that I had made in my
talk
which took place in the morning of the same day. In fact, there was no
mistake, but I was not given the opportunity by the chair of the session
to intervene (with the pretext that it was the last talk of the day and
we needed to finish). So I talked to Lawvere afterwards explaining that
I had
made no mistakes at all in my talk, and asked him to rectify his
statement. He recognized that I was right, but I had to insist a lot to
make him retreat his claim on the following day, something he eventually
did albeit rather reluctantly.
A few days later, I participated in an informal workshop on topos theory
at the University of Bristol to which Lawvere had invited me. After I
exposed the contents of a draft of my preprint “Lattices of theories”,
Lawvere began to aggressively argue - and this lasted for a couple of
hours at least - that the duality theorem could not be true, trying to
find counterexamples to it. These conversations were recorded by Michael
Wright, who attended the whole meeting. I eventually managed to convince
him, with the help of Matias Menni, that the theorem was indeed correct.
In spite of these discouraging experiences, I tried my best to instaure
a fruitful scientific dialogue with him; for instance, I arranged for
him to be invited to give a talk at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
(he accepted the invitation). A week later, I sat at the same table as
him and Johnstone at the CT2010 social dinner; the following day I would
present the preprint “The unification of Mathematics via Topos Theory”
at the conference. Lawvere warned me: “nobody will follow you”. The talk
went apparently pretty well: I did not receive any criticisms or
aggressive remarks from the audience, just positive comments and
enthusiastic reactions from many of the young people present. But when I
tried to approach Lawvere afterwards, I found him unwilling to talk to
me and on the point of leaving the conference before the end.
Experiences with I.
Moerdijk and the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic
In 2010 I. Moerdijk as Editor of the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic
made pressures to me, in the context of the submission of my paper “A
characterization theorem for geometric logic”, so that I refer to the
duality theorem which plays a crucial role in the proof of the main
result as “folklore” or that I cite as references for it texts that in
fact do not contain any statement, let alone any proof, of it. After I
pointed out to him that these sources were not relevant in connection
with the duality theorem and I asked for any other references proving
that the result was not original to me, Moerdijk did not provide any and
eventually accepted - although avoiding to explicitly recognize that I
was right (he did not reply to my question) - that I cite my preprint
“Lattices of theories” in the article in connection with such result.
I should add that many people reported to me throughout the past years
having heard Moerdijk commenting about me that significant parts of my
work consisted of well-known results.
Despite this,
I proposed Moerdijk to collaborate on an
occasion on which it would have been natural to do so, but he refused. I
was therefore not exceedingly surprised when in 2014, as Editor of the
Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, he rejected
my
paper “Fraisse's construction from a topos-theoretic perspective” after
several months from its submission, on the grounds that he was not able
to find a suitable referee and had only heard vague and negative
opinions about it. This paper, which I consider one of my very best
works, was then submitted to the journal “Logica Universalis” and
accepted after only
3
months on the basis of three detailed and positive
referee reports. Nonetheless, this happened in 2014, after I had been
trying to get this paper published for five years (receiving a total of
6 rejections by different journals, always accompanied by erroneous or
scientifically vague and ungrounded reports).
The remarks of Steve
Awodey about my solution to Moerdijk’s conjecture
S. Awodey's MathSciNet review of my paper “A characterization theorem
for geometric logic”, which provided a solution to a conjecture of I.
Moerdijk dating back to 1989, does not do any justice to the paper.
Indeed, it does not even mention this fact, referring to the methods
used in the paper as
"straightforward considerations involving classifying toposes".
I do not consider this paper as a particularly
sophisticated piece of work, especially compared with my other articles,
but there are ideas in it and Moerdijk's conjecture was certainly
non-straightforward, otherwise it would have been solved immediately, by
Moerdijk himself for instance (or by Makkai, to which Moerdijk’s letter
containing the conjecture was originally addressed).
The rejection of
“Lattices of theories” from the Editors of the Proceedings of the CT2010
In 2010 my paper “Lattices of theories” got rejected by the four editors
of the proceedings of the CT 2010 to be published in the Journal of Pure
and Applied Algebra, after just two days of its
receipt and without
subjecting it to a proper refereeing, on the grounds that “the paper is
way
too long, with large parts of known material”. The Editors also added
that “it is our opinion that your paper needs a complete redoing, and we
are convinced that can be achieved by reducing it to new
and original
research”. I repeatedly asked them, both collectively and individually,
to back up their
claims with at least one precise reference of a result in that paper
that I attributed to myself but which had in fact been proved before,
but nobody replied.
The experience with
EPSRC
In 2012 my application for an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship to be held
at the University of Cambridge got rejected without even being
shortlisted for interview, after 7 reports were collected, of which 5
gave the maximal possible mark, one gave a very good mark (5/6) and one,
coming at the very end of the review collecting process, gave 3/6 with
very poor scientific justifications. This latter referee explicitly
stated that “Caramello is clearly prolific and energetic, and she has a
good track record of problem solving on the interface between topos
theory and logic” and that “were it not for the excessive hype, I would
probably argue for it (the proposal) to be funded”, justifying his very
negative evaluation on the sole pretext that I was “overselling” my
research and that this could be dangerous for the career of the two
research assistants associated to the project. When I contacted the
University of Cambridge in order to ask for the support necessary for
issuing a complaint to EPSRC concerning the evaluation of my
application, which was blatantly unfair for several reasons (normally a
proposal is shortlisted by EPSRC for interview with just 3 positive
reviews), such a support was refused.
I will inform the EPSRC about the results of this initiative of
clarification, since the fact, emerged on this occasion, that the
professors of the Cambridge research group to which I belonged were
diffusing
ungrounded
negative opinions on my work and my person is
relevant in connection with the rejection of my application. Any
(non-confidential) response that I receive from them will be reported
here. I
will also ask
Dr. Peter Hedges and Prof.
Lynn Gladden of the research office of the University of Cambridge
to reconsider
my request of support for
my
complaint to EPSRC. I do not
certainly expect, after more than 2 years, EPSRC’s decision to be
revisited, but I think that it is important that
the persons inside the University of Cambridge
who are scientifically responsible for the decision of not supporting my
complaint to EPSRC are identified.