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I am an undergraduate student (final year, Computer Science). I am interested in research. I have worked and progressed (I believe) on a specific problem, namely graph isomorphism. Instructors in my department are not interested in that topic. I have contacted them a couple of times, and they did not reject my work nor confirm it. How can I proceed now, i.e., how can I get reviewed to confirm or verify my work?

Edit 1: The answer below by pjs36 seems to be"personal" (pointing my poor writing skill), but the answer should be general. I may have this problem, others might not have. So, what one can do to get reviewed by others?

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If you want to get people to review your work, why not just submit it for peer review? Write it up for an appropriate journal, submit, and see what happens. There is no requirement to have a professor involved, it's just often helpful.

Probably, your paper will get rapidly rejected. That's OK. What's important is to learn from the reasons that are stated for your rejection. I think that you want to have people either say your work is correct (in which case they will publish it) or to point out a mathematical flaw. You might, however, get rejected for another reason, such as not making sense to the reviewers or being seen as not significant in some way.

If this happens, do not write off the reviewers as being "biased" or "lacking in vision" or whatever. Go down that path, and you are likely to become a crank. Instead, if that happens, listen to what they say and figure out how to present your work to address those objections. In fact, that might be a good place to go for help from a professor again, not asking them to evaluate your mathematics, but to help with the presentation of mathematics.

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  • I am not familiar to 'peer review ', i will consider this, but what i need is feedback, someone saying , this is not correct, that needs to be clarified .. something like this, can peer review do that? I usually mail, which get low response(I read a post regarding that on A SE), what other ways? an would you please elaborate 'crank' in academic perspective, please. Thanks for your nice answer.
    – Michael
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 16:06
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    @Jim "Peer review" = "submit to a journal for publication". As for being a crank; I've added a link to the crackpot index, which is a wonderful semi-serious introduction to the way that some academics think of it, which I think you may find informative.
    – jakebeal
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 16:24
  • .is there an intermediate way before "submit to a journal for publication"
    – Michael
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 22:01
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    @Jim Sure: run it by your mentors. But that seems to be the part you're having trouble with...
    – jakebeal
    Commented Jul 29, 2015 at 4:50
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The title suggests you want new individuals to review your work, while the last sentence seems now like you need advice reviewing your own work. I'll focus primarily on the title question.

I think you should ask why is nobody commenting on my work?, rather than who can I get to comment on my work? and I'll share my thoughts on that question.

I don't know how you're presenting your work, but if it's anything like this question, that might play a significant role.

What I mean to say is this. You did not explain your situation very well. Sure, I got the idea, but this is a relatively mundane situation, "Nobody will pay attention to me." It's just not communicated clearly (or professionally, do you really need to abbreviate department?), as I've pointed out that it's not even clear what question you're asking.

But when it comes to actual scientific research, we leave the world of the mundane. You are potentially discovering something nobody has seen before, or at least working on very technical material. Anyone reading your work or listening to you cannot simply fill in the gaps or correct any imprecision. If they could, it is overwhelmingly likely not 'research' in the academic sense of discovering or clarifying things that are new to the world, not just you.

My point is supported by your posts on MSE about Brocard's Conjecture (see, for example, here). You used very unusual notation, lots of handwaving, and were generally unable to explain yourself sufficiently, by mathematical standards, in the body of the post or in the comments.

If you are asking faculty members to comment on work that's presented similarly, dismissal seems like a likely outcome. The flaws above are so serious that I can only assume (in that example) you hadn't made any real progress on Brocard's Conjecture, and thus it wasn't really worth my time to continue attempting to make sense of what you had presented.

You need to sit down and ask yourself some serious questions about what you have produced and how it's presented. Questions like "Is this true? How can I tell? Is my argument correct beyond a shadow of a doubt, and has it been tested on several examples? Have I made any conclusions that simply don't follow, or used leaps of logical faith to justify anything? Have I explained things so that, with minimal effort, this can be read and understood by a professional?"

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    @Jim No. It takes me at least 10 times as much effort to understand it than it would be if you knew how to write mathematics and standard graph theory terminology, and I still can't figure out exactly what you mean. You haven't made it clear whether your vertices are arbitrary or specially chosen. You confuse vertices with numbers, graphs with matrices, use the same letter for different vertices in different iterations, et c. Writing mathematics is hard, equivalent in difficulty to writing a program without bugs without doing any testing (other than by hand). Commented Jul 27, 2015 at 1:40

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