In this page you will find writings that could be considered by some libellous. Now, according to Collins' English Dictionary, libel is defamation, which in turn is injury, which for our purposes is harm done to sb's reputation. Curiously, no falseness is assumed anywhere. I assume, though, that if you tell things that are true, the harm to sb's reputation is not made by you, but by himself. On the other hand, Webster's does involve falseness in its definition of libel. (I have always liked Collins better, though.) You will not find anything libellous in that sense here, because all of what I say is true (as far as I know; a few details may be imprecise, as it is always the case). Some people, will extremely dislike the things that I say here, and this may lead them to sue me. It is only in that sense that these pages can be deemed as `potentially libellous'. The results of such a process are unpredictable, though.

Right now only the things related to the open letter to the president of the IMU can be found here. Forthcoming writings will be:

• The whole narration on a current method to be elected Principal of a University in Catalonia. It needs the active help and commitment of a possibly, and even preferably, Communist or highly structured trade union. The main tool is to get the control of the hiring in each department (union pressure helps a lot there). Then you hire only those persons that would never be hired in any other university, which means that you can control them since if you fired them, no one else would hire them. To reinforce the control, you hire them with contracts that are to be renewed each year. When, after ten years or so, you get proportion close to 40% of the faculty hired in such conditions, you are bound to be elected. Surprisingly, it has worked at least once.
• An explanation on how and why every hiring in my department was made during the ten years I spent there (I kind of took notes). You will find there almost anything, from family values to blackmailing of the hired to the hiring ones, but little, if any, scientific criteria. It has to be told, especially since my department went around claiming to be one of the few `honest hirers' in Spain. The fact that I expressed concern about that repeatedly and in public is one of the reasons for which I was fired.
• The whole story of my experiences and of what I saw in Orsay, one of the main temples of modern science, and not only the tiny bits you can find in the open letter to the president of the IMU. This one will be funny, I assure you.

I assume that, if you are reading this, you will have heard something about this affair. In any case, if you are interested in it, first of all you should read the open letter to the president of the IMU, that I wrote, and where (most of) the facts are explained. I only would like to make a remark about that letter, and it is that I had a lot of fun, though. If someone who does not know me reads that letter, (s)he will think of me as a desperate loon who was unable to cope with what was going on around. The style that produced such impression was forced by both the subject and the circumstances, and was carefully chosen. Nothing of what I say or of what emanates from the letter is false. But, thankfully, I have intense inner life and life outside mathematics, and I was able to see all of that with the required detachment.

What are the consequences of publishing such a letter? Well, they are the same consequences that has any strongly critical statement made by any not sufficiently supported scientist. I was fired. In fact, it was simpler that that. Nowadays, non tenured assistants in Spain have short term contracts. My contract was to finish on September 30th. All the persons in the University having the same kind of contract were offered a renewed contract, but I was not.

I kind of expected that, even if I find it most unfair, and a clear case of repression of the freedom of speech. At least in Spain, and hardly in any country, you can not expose openly the set of common misdoings of professors without being fired. Only in some extreme cases, and when you have a very strong support of some part of your colleagues, you have some chance of partial success. Take two of the most publicised examples. A researcher goes invited to a laboratory. There he steals some viruses. Afterwards he claims to have found these viruses by himself. In most niches of society, this behaviour would lead the researcher to jail. In the scientific community, tough, and after a `reasonable' settlement (I would call it a cover up), the two laboratories involved share the honours of the discovery. In the other case, a well known researcher, also invited in a foreign laboratory, steals results from a graduate student. Later he is given a Nobel price in part thanks to these results. Again, in most niches of society, such a behaviour would lead to the withdrawal of the price and possibly to jail. In science, a `reasonable agreement' is arrived at, and still the career of the student is in jeopardy.

There is more in these two examples than what meets the eye. In both there was much at stake. This made that the press was interested in them. Thus some kind of settlement was necessary. Moreover, in both the misbehaver was an invited foreigner. This means that he had to face a whole national scientific community. And in both the misbehaver was a well positioned person in the scientific community, even if he miscalculated his power. Stealing of results, however, is much more likely to happen between persons in the same laboratory, or at least in the same national scientific community, and usually the robber will be a professor whereas the robbed will be a graduate student. Such cases, however, never, and I insist never, come to light. Why? Because the robbed one has no chance of succeeding in his/her claims inside the scientific community, since, such behaviours being as usual as they are, those holding the power would stick with one another in every single case. And this is what happened to me (and to many people whose cases have been less notorious than mine, but that have had essentially the same end).

Let us proceed with the follow-up of my case. I wrote the letter, and send it to a list of department heads that I took from the AMS home page, and to the board of the IMU. According to my calculations it took the letter some five days to go around the world. I sent it on Friday evening and I began to receive feedback between Tuesday evening and Wednesday evening. I received all kinds of feedback, from derogatory to `good luck in your struggle'. The only kind of feedback I did not receive was from the IMU. I would like to quote some of the feedback, since some of it is indeed curious, but I will not quote anything that anybody sends to me personally. The following letters that I publish here are letters that people have written to me on behalf of their positions. Since they are public positions, I feel free to quote these letters.

Besides of sending the letter, I tried to get it published on some mathematics-related journal. My second choice was to send it to the Mathematical Intelligencer. Their editor, Chandler Davis, wrote me the most intelligent letter I have received on this subject, even if he missed some points. He obviously took a lot of work to write that letter, and he arrived at the same conclusions I had arrived some months before. But by the end of my open letter to the president of the IMU you will find some of the reasons why his recommendations would not work. In any case, I did appreciate not only the letter but the fact that he had arrived at the same conclusions I had arrived at, even if I had later learnt that these conclusions were wrong. I am going now to comment this letter in detail:

Dear Dr Gudayol:

I read your rather long accusation with interest. Of course it is not publishable as it is. Perhaps some portion of it should be published, but I don't know how to suggest you proceed.
In fact he does.
You complain that the French mathematical establishment has gone beyond the usual bounds of propriety in pushing its candidates for honours; this has been said already by Arnold and does not need to be repeated by you.
I do not agree with that. As I tell, the same person (the late J.L Lions) that was accused of doing such pushing, was later appointed head of a committee that gave other prices. And the results were quite similar. Thus Arnold's accusations were good for nothing, since they did not prevent the same thing to happen again. Such things are to be said again and again, until they have the effect of preventing improper behaviours.
Your conjectures about politicking on the Fields Medal selection committee are not plausible, and you say you don't care much about the Medals anyway, so you should probably drop this part of your complaint. (On one hand, without somebody supporting some part of the story, you can not expect it to be believed; on the other hand, it would be absurd for you to do a lot of investigation in the search for supporting testimony, because it would take you away from activities more valuable to you and to the world.)
I like the word `plausible'. Those ships that received the SOS message from the Titanic said that they did not thought it `plausible'. I do not care about the Medal, except that it is the Medals that appear in the story what make the story relevant. Thus I can not drop this part of the complain without making the whole complaint irrelevant to the world at large. I do not have (yet) anyone willing to support the story in public (if you dear reader are willing to do so, e-mail me). But, on the other hand, there was already a wide knowledge that something really weird had happened with the 1998 Fields Medals. One of the purposes of the letter was, precisely, to validate its contents. Because once the people began to talk about the subject, more of those in the know would say, at least privately, that they knew it was true. So far, at least, this is not a battle in the courts but in the public opinion scene.
That leaves two major areas of complaint in your account. One, you complain that Orsay treats visitors too coldly. That could be the subject of an amusing short story.
That will be the subject of an amusing shortish story.
Secondly, you complain that Yoccoz used a result of yours which he had been informed of, with credit to you. Good! I'm glad he found it helped his research program, and so should you be. I'm glad that your teachers who informed him of it gave you credit. I'm sorry that Yoccoz was not gracious enough to take the opportunity when he met you to say with cheerful enthusiasm, "So you are Gudayol! I was happy to use your result! I'm happy to meet you!" I hope he will make up for his failure of courtesy by future courtesy toward you, and of course by expressing his indebtedness in print.
Well, part of the point is that he has not given any credit, since those results, on behalf of which he was given the Fields Medal, were by then (and, as far as I know, by now) not yet published. And I would like to recall that he did not use some results I had found; he used some results I had been put to work on. There is a difference.
Do your teachers agree that he ought to do so? Maybe it would be better manners for them to say this to him than for you. Your telling the story as one of theft is unfortunate, and will make it harder for them and for Yoccoz to express their appreciation of you in a normal way; but I hope they will do so anyway.
Well, as it is explained in the letter, some months before I wrote it I tried to talk to Fontich (and he talked to Simo afterwards) on the subject. I did not mention anything about the Fields Medal, or anything related to it. But the only thing he was able to say was `Can you prove it?'. So the whole thing, from his point of view, was not whether what I said was true or not, but whether I could produce enough evidence. From that point on, it was theft.

I hope your research is still going well and you are finding good jobs and fellowships.

Sincerely, Chandler Davis
I am not getting any job (more on it later), and I will not make any kind of unpaid research, since I have no intention of ending up starving for mathematics. There are few things worth dying for, and (sorry) mathematics is not one of them. If (when) I get a good job, I will do research.

I also tried to publish the letter in the Notices of the AMS. This was my first choice, not because I believed that such institutionalized journal would publish it, but because such an attempt had to be done. The reply of the Notices of the AMS editor, Harold P. Boas Jr., is here. It does not need any comment, since he simply passes the buck to the Committee on Professional ethics (COPE) of the AMS. After hard digging (the link in the letter is useless) the AMS web site, and reading the statutes and rules for applicants, I sent this letter, together with this account of the facts I was complaining on. The chair of the COPE refused to consider the case. His reply is here. He claims that my complaints are about the IMU, not the AMS, and he refuses to take any action. Well, this is not true. My complaints are about the behaviour of a series of people, most of whom are members of the AMS and some (at least McMullen) American residents. Or maybe is this the problem? In any case, their refusal to investigate behaviours by members of the AMS that are in clear contradiction with the same ethical guidelines the AMS had set show how useful such guidelines are when there is something important at stake.

The only thing that remains to be explained is the results of my quest for a decent job not far away from home. As I have said, after I published the letter, they did not renew my contract at the University of Barcelona, as they did with all the other assistants in my situation. Before that, I had sought a position at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. But there, the then head of the department, Joaquim Bruna, told me that the only thing he could offer me was a part-time assistantship with a salary less than the minimum wage. At the same time, though, he was saying to the foreign visitors at the CRM that he had offered me (and I had refused) an associate professorship. Well, the position he had offered me happens to be called (in Spanish) profesor asociado but the translation is at least misleading. I also applied at the Politechnical University of Catalonia. Their method for selecting the candidates (which has a quite peculiar relation with their quality and independence) excluded me from the pool right from the start. I have also applied for jobs in the other Catalan universities that have offered them, with the same results. Applying in Spain outside Catalonia is pointless, once one knows how applications are dealt with (I applied at the UAM, though, with the same negative result).

More peculiar is the fact that I was denied permission to ask for any French position (l'habilitation). I must recognize that their argument was related to my methods of publishing my work. But I have strong doubts on the fact that this (my publication methods) was really the point. As far as I know, no minimally able candidate has ever been refused l'habilitation on such grounds. And whatever the reason (either my methods or my letter) the motivation was clearly a political one, not a scientifical one.

As a result of these series of facts, my scientific career is in a stand-by position. I will resume it when/if I ever believe that I will get a fair treatment.

The battle is not over, though. My next step will be to publish this letter. It is a shorter (and harsher) version of the previous one, made on occasion of the 2002 ACM. You can wish me good luck.

Last modified: Sat Aug 17 11:10:53 CEST 2002