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I have written a mathematical paper in cryptography and I would like to publish it. However, I don't know any professors in the field with whom I could collaborate. What should I do? How to make contacts that could help me publish my work?

Rodrigo de Azevedo
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Bubbaloo
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  • As it is, the question is not a good fit - it asks too many questions at once and is borderline shoppin question. If you can rephrase the question to something more general (like how to find collaborators to publish a paper), it will be better. – Sursula Oct 14 '22 at 06:50
  • Cross-posted on Cryptography.SE – Nobody Oct 14 '22 at 07:15
  • @Nobody Actually, the admin from Crypto SE told him to go here. – Neuchâtel Oct 14 '22 at 10:50
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    @padovapadova I think Nobody linked that comment only to provide evidence that OP's paper is about a "famous open problem". – Federico Poloni Oct 14 '22 at 11:46
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    If you know the current literature in cryptography, then you could go ahead and publish with no collaborators. – GEdgar Oct 14 '22 at 11:57
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    I added an additional duplicate target -- I'm not sure that "breaking RSA in non-polynomial time" is a "famous open problem." But I am sure that there are lots of other questions here about how to publish a paper when you're not a professor or affiliated with one. The bottom line is that if you know how to do publishable research, you can just submit it directly, you don't need a professor co-author. – cag51 Oct 15 '22 at 14:05

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Amateur mathematicians suffer from selection bias: We hear about the surprising contributions by e.g. the French Dentist who publishes papers in Graph Theory etc. Most professors are very wary of people outside of the field coming to them and asking them to look at their stuff. They might end up having to explain to someone that this idea is not new or that a paper is hard to understand and in no time, what was supposed to be a brief glance turns into a nightmare.

You need to overcome this bias. You do so by learning a lot about the field and start using their language so that someone in the field can in fact look at your result at a glance and decide whether they want to look at the details. In the process, you might figure out that your result is not new, which is not surprising, cryptography has been a hot field since the internet started.

Thomas Schwarz
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