How does one write a mathematical paper?

Question

I am an undergraduate student of computer science. I do mathematics on the side. There are some ideas I think are worthy of publishing, and doing so would certainly be good for my academic credentials.

I contacted a professor about this issue and the paper I had prepared was not really written as a math paper. So I need to know how to actually write one. Please, write down all clues you think are noteworthy and link useful pages.

How long should a paper be? Is it a problem if it has just about $10$ pages?

I was told my introduction needs to be longer than it is. Why can I not just write "In this paper, I shall derive formulae for integrals of this form." and proceed further?

Answer 1

This will be a tricky thing to get good answers to sites like this; a lot of the conventions you get from reading papers and writing other things that aren't 'papers'. Briefly on the specific questions:

• No, plenty of papers are only 10 pages.
• No, you don't need a long introduction.
• It might be appropriate to just start with exactly what the main result of the paper is in a no-nonsense way, but this takes some experience to get right because one is usually expected to contextualize the problem. If it's some isolated curiosity then it may not need much context, but if some bigger, deeper, or more well-known problem, it ought to have much more context to meet conventional expectations.