| Even if your observations/findings are brilliant, you can't be taken seriously unless you're published in an academic journal and you can't do that "cold." Basically, the prerequisites are: 1) You have to speak the language and 2) You have to know some people. #1 Know the Language - Let's say you believe you have a new mathematical proof. Even if it was perfectly valid, you'd get instantly rejected for publishing if it wasn't formatted correctly, used accepted language and definitions of things, was sufficiently rigorous and referenced relevant prior work. That's tough for an amateur to pull off by themselves. So, one solution is to take your best attempt at a rigorous amateur proof to a mathematician at a local college or university. Even a curious grad student in the field who is willing to indulge you can help clean up the work. As a bonus, that can help with problem #2 - knowing some people. If your proof, now translated to proper mathematician-speak, holds water maybe you can leverage your proof-reader to "level-up" and get your proof seen by an actual professor in the field who can lend you some credibility and get you introduced to other mathematicians. Even then, your chances of getting published are near zero. However, the recent example of two high-school students who came up with a novel proof of the Pythagorean theorem shows how it can be done. They first were able to present a "poster" of their proof at a conference where it was seen by mathematicians and where they could be quizzed about it on the spot. Surviving that gauntlet PLUS the exposure allowed them to catch the eye of a publisher willing to take a chance on them. |