After many grueling and tedious hours of learning LaTeX and the formatting of math papers, and reading countless papers on arXiv, I'm finally left with a reasonable draft for a proof that I'd hope to see published. At such point, I realized I had no clue on what the process of publication was. Hence, I asked my friend, Shawn, what the process was like for his field (being in microbiology), and if an undergrad could publish as a sole-author. His response:
In my field, papers must be co-signed by a faculty-appointed supervisor.
Without one, I reached out to the mathematics professors to see if any were interested in co-signing and for more info on the general process. Their response:
Independent research as an undergrad is not common, but if the results are interesting enough, then you can publish as the sole author.
I then explained what the paper was about, (proving the existence of a closed-formed function for Conway's base-13 function over certain domains), and he told me:
That does seem plausibly interesting, the first step (after formatting a final version) would be to upload the proof to arXiv.
Thankfully, having a university domain for an email grants be the ability to do so. After exhausting the help of all the professors that had time for me, I'm still left with a few questions.
With the professors at my university justifiably busy, are there resources for having someone proof-read my paper?
After arXiv, what would the following steps be?
Any additional information would be hugely appreciated.
Edit: I'm aware that, intuitively, different journals publish material on different subjects. A problem is, with not having a large vocabulary for mathematical terminology, I'm not sure what area of math my results fall under.