Ordinarily, I only mention my research papers on this blog when they are first submitted, or if a major update is required.  With the paper arising from the DHJ Polymath “Low Dimensions” project, though, the situation is a little different as the collaboration to produce the paper took place on this blog.

Anyway, the good news is that the paper has been accepted for the Szemerédi birthday conference proceedings.  The referee was positive and recommended only some minor changes (I include the list of changes below the fold).  I have incorporated these changes, and the new version of the paper can be found here.  Within a few days I need to return the paper to the editor, so this is the last chance to propose any further corrections or changes (though at this stage any major changes are unlikely to be feasible).

The editor asked a good question: should we have a list of participants for this project somewhere?  If so, it seems to make more sense to have this list as a link on the wiki, rather than in the paper itself. But making a list opens the can of worms of deciding what level of participation should be the threshold for inclusion in the list – should someone who only contributed, say, one tangential comment to one of the blog posts be listed alongside a substantially more active participant?

One possibility is that of self-reporting; we could set up a page for participants on the wiki and let anyone who felt like they contributed add their name, and rely on the honour code to keep it accurate.    This might be feasible as long as the page is kept unofficial (so, in particular, it will not be used as the formal list of authors for the paper).

A related question is whether to add an explicit link to the timeline for progress on this project and on the sister “New proof” project.  If so, this should also be kept unofficial (there was no formal guidelines as to what was included in the timeline and what was not).

These decisions do not necessarily have to be taken quickly; one can simply point to the wiki in the paper (as is already done in the current version), and update the wiki later if we decide to add these sorts of acknowledgments on that site.

Incidentally, if we have another successful Polymath project to write up, I would now strongly recommend using version control software (such as Subversion or git) to organise the writing process, both at the informal notes stage and also at the drafting stage.  It is certainly far superior to our improvised solution of putting the raw TeX files on a wiki…

In the referee’s opinion the paper is very well written and there were a few typos find only. I would like to ask you and the contributors to check it again (spell check) and send me the tex file.

Thank you and the contributors to write the paper and sending it to this special volume. I have one more question. Do you want to add a list of contributors with affiliation and/or the time-line as an appendix or anything like that?  Please let me know.

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1. Page 5. First formula.  “w(k)=” should be “w(k)\in”

2 Page 15. Proof of lemma 3.6   Th proof begins with “Suppose not”, however since the lemma is a negative statement this is confusing. It would be preferable to say “Suppose that A has two parallel [3]^4 slices.”

3 Page 25. Last formula. This sum should have “\alpha_i(A)” rather than a_i

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