Those who are just learning about the “Sokal Affair” for the first time will benefit from reading the Wikipedia article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Goes to show that an inability to distinguish nonsense from scholarship exists in both of the two cultures.

You’ve missed the point. It’s not that journal reviewers can’t distinguish between nonsense and scholarship, it’s that this particular “journal” isn’t interested in the distinction. They are only interested in the publishing fees.

long story short sokal was just beeing a dick.

But the somewhat sloppy style of the editor’s email is of a part with the other evidence for a vanity journal.

This is actually the usual approach for author-pays scientific journals. Whether or not such journals are “vanity” journals (as this one appears to be) depends on the journal itself, and the field. (For example, three of the top five journals in astronomy are author-payment-based, and have been for decades.)

Mathematician here. To echo comments by Roy Wiggins and Alex Rudnick (and to somewhat address metacalifragilistic’s comment), this is, pretty blatantly, a vanity journal. I get a spammy email from them at least once a day (which is frustrating, because they [intentionally?] have a name very similar to a top math journal). No serious pure math journal (with the exception of very recent experimentations with open access journals, which are kind of unnecessary due to the arxiv) charges for publication. And, randomly browsing their publications (so, say, 5 data points), the published papers have pretty clearly not been vetted, let alone edited for correct english, and are generally non-sensical.

(In particular, this is really rather different than Sokal.)

It is well known that there exists a Wiener, trivial, semi-projective

HOLY SHIT IT CAN SEE ME SOMEHOW!

There are a number of ways of classifying publications:
  – Peer reviewed vs. not peer reviewed
  – How much respect they hold in the field
  – How much they charge for publication
  – For profit vs Not for profit
  – Requiring ‘important’ research vs. requiring ‘valid’ research (i.e. do the reviewers have to think it is a useful contribution, or just that you didn’t do anything obviously wrong.)

The Sokal affair pointed out that a highly respected journal in a field was accepting papers that they perhaps shouldn’t have been.

This pointed out that a journal that charges for publication (most don’t charge much), and which was apparently not well respected, was doing a poor job of peer review.

Both are useful.  It is really great to know which journals to avoid.  But I don’t think this is an indictment of mathematics in the same way that the Sokal affair was an indictment of postmodernism.

If you want other instances, see http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/blog/ 

The importance difference is that the mathematical nonsense paper was rigorous.

http://www.scirp.org/Journal/Home.aspx?JournalID=535

Even though the paper is “peer reviewed”, there may be the implicit assumption that papers in that journal will not be cited for any wide-reaching conclusions.  Anyone in academia can point to a few published papers in their field that are incorrect or nearly valueless – it’s unavoidable even with the best of intentions by all parties.  Generally, these papers will either be ignored (not cited much) or later papers will specifically refute their conclusions.

Social Text is not peer reviewed either. That does not really work for what is actually a journal of aesthetics. 

The magazine does not claim to be a scientific peer reviewed journal. So treating it as one didn’t make any sense.

The mathgen hoax seems flawed because they didn’t get to peer review. It doesn’t count.

The people who did the job properly were a couple of MIT students who submitted a paper generated using a Perl script to one of those affairs that accepts everything they get.

The paper was accepted. Advances in Pure Mathematics is a money for resume padding scam journal, which makes this case different than the Sokal hoax.

From the acceptance letter:

Thank you for your contribution to the Advances in Pure Mathematics (APM). We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript: … has been accepted. Congratulations!

Anyway, the manuscript has some flaws are required to be revised : …

Scams the lot of them.