Best of the Rest

Via Marginal Revolution I learn that the cool new journal Rejecta Mathematica has published its first copy. The idea of the journal is to publish interesting papers that have been rejected several times from academic publication. There's no way I have enough maths to really understand all of what's going on, but each paper includes a brief rejection history (or a link to one); they make fun reading.

Some are a little petulant:

Mathematics my foot! ... Programming is much much harder than doing mathematics. I bet that the referee will never ever be able to write such a program.

Some more forlorn:

With high optimism, we submitted a paper to a top-tier image processing journal. ... But alas, our enthusiasm was deflated due to the following review points...

And some kind of funny:

Our obsession with these simple matrices has generated a great deal of criticism. Lubos Motl, the string theorist, called us F–ing Crackpots on my blog ...

and

Where did I go wrong? Perhaps I should not have called professional mathematicians, in the first paragraph, “meaning-imposers” who generate “inconsistencies and confusions”. Perhaps I should not have asked “Where did I go wrong?” on page 61; or, “Have I made another blunder?” on page 62. ... Maybe I used too many exclamation marks.

It's hard to do them justice as a whole, so I suggest you read them for yourself!