Dear Colleagues,

As most of you probably know, one of the longest-standing and most
famous open problems of lattice theory, the Dilworth's problem, was
solved last year by Fred Wehrung. I was shocked to learn last month
that the paper in which he solves it was rejected by the Journal of
the AMS.

I contacted Fred to obtain some more information and he was kind
enough to forward me his rejection email, which I give below (with
Fred's permission and editor's name edited out):

Dear Prof. Wehrung --

I'm writing about the paper "A solution to Dilworth's congruence
lattice problem" that you submitted to JAMS.

All the referees agreed that your paper represented one of the most
important developments in lattice theory in many years. On the basis
of this, I brought to the paper to the full editorial board at our
recent annual meeting.

After some discussion, the board finally came to the conclusion that
the paper was not a good match for JAMS. The feeling was that the
problem that the paper solves did not have the sort of interaction
with other branches of mathematics that is typical of JAMS papers.
Therefore I must return the paper now so that you can make other
arrangements for its publication.

I'm sorry not to have better news to report, but as you may know JAMS
publishes only 1000 pages a year, so we get many excellent submissions
that we are unable to accept. I also apologize for the delay in the
decision -- besides the fact that the main referee report took a long
time to arrive, I also felt that it was important for the full
editorial board to discuss this case.

Sincerely,

Now, a few FACTS:

1. Fred's paper is only 14 pages long (concerning the '1000 pages')
2. It solves an universal algebraic question about lattices using
methods and ideas of set theory. It is quite possible the methods used
in the paper will be used later for problems in model theory, or more
generally logic, and perhaps other areas.
3. From the JAMS website, Journal overview link: "This journal is
devoted to research articles of the highest quality in all areas of
pure and applied mathematics."

This is a gross error by the JAMS editorial board. It is okay for a
journal such as JAMS to prefer some areas over others, but if one has
THE BEST paper in a whole area in many years submitted to a journal
which publishes "articles of the highest quality in ALL areas", then
it is reasonable to believe it will be published. Otherwise the
editorial board gives an opinion of a whole area.

I believe we as a community should react. Perhaps a joint letter to
the AMS Notices, signed by the major experts in lattice theory and
universal algebra and as many other researchers in the area(s) as
desire to join in.

What do you think?

By the way, Fred resubmitted the paper to another journal, and there
is no desire on his part to reverse the JAMS decision. This is about
my desire to prevent future events of this sort.

Petar Markovic
pera@...