Comments on the claims made by Penn State's PR department in "Student refines 100-year-old math problem, expanding wind energy possibilities"

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43162544

My comments on these comments.

First, the article "Glauert's optimum rotor disk revisited" was written by a graduate student. Who is doing a Masters, not a Ph.D. There is a co-author, who is presumably her advisor, but at the end of the article there is short sentence about the author contributions:

  >DT performed all derivations and wrote the paper. SS advised on derivations and edited the paper.

What is the purpose of graduate school? Graduate school is a place where future researchers learn their future trade. They start from being just students who learn known stuff and do homework assignments and learn for the final exams, and they progress to researcher who are able to carry out original research. And part of this progression is to actually publish research that is original, but not necessarily ground breaking. The vast majority of graduate students do that, they publish articles that will not change the future of science. This article here, "Glauerts' optimum..." is just like that. It's written by a very junior researcher, it is rigorous, but it is not going to be impactful.

Now let's move on to the "Comments". Their author is a Professor with more than 3 decades of experience and hundreds of articles to his name. For some reason, he decided that the best way to spend his time right now is to demolish a graduate student's contribution.

The "Comments" has two parts, the first is concerned with the value of the work, the second with some form of self-plagiarism.

In the first part, Prof. Leishman points out that the article just shows an alternative derivation of Glauert's result, and this alternative is not offering any new insights.

In the second part, Prof. Leishman points out that essentially the same work was presented at a conference, by the same authors. I guess his concern is that the authors are trying to get credit twice for the same work. The papers are [1] and [2]. Does this constitute some form of ethical breach? I might find this a bit annoying personally, but I don't consider this plagiarism, or any form of misconduct. In the end, the paper was subject to peer review, and presumably the editors of the journal ran the paper through some plagiarism detecting software.

I find what Prof. Leishman did here to be mean. A young person is at the start of their career. She will either continue to do research, or she will pick a different type of career. In either case, instead of getting an encouraging welcome from the research community, she is basically named and shamed by an established Professor who is probably one of the most influential members of his field of research. This is potentially a very traumatic experience for her.

By the way, if you go to the website "Rate my professors", you'll find comments like this about Prof. Leishman [3]:

  > This guy knows his stuff but he's rude, condescending.
  > Very rude professor and very self absorbed. [...] Extra credit requires you to go through and fix his ebook.

[1] https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2024-84552

[2] https://wes.copernicus.org/articles/10/451/2025/wes-10-451-2...

[3] https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor/2176266