重贴:Mathematical Community Greets Earth-Shattering Claims With Silence


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送交者: aliastwo 于 2007-01-08, 09:34:32:

回答: Mr. Jiang dibs on Riemann Hypothesis 由 aliastwo 于 2007-01-08, 09:23:47:

学术成果惊天动地,学界反应一片沉默。中国数学家蒋春暄忍无可忍,被迫把论文投给Dibs!

Mathematical Community Greets Earth-Shattering Claims With Silence

In response to one of the very earliest Dibs! posts — a review of Dan Rockmore's
Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis (http://www.dibsblog.com/?p=16)— Dibs!
has recently received an astonishing email from Jiang Chun-Xuan, a mathematician
in China who claims to have disproved the legendarily difficult problem.
Jiang included in his email a detailed mathematical paper (which you can view online
in pdf form http://www.i-b-r.org/docs/JiangRiemann.pdf) which purports to
conclusively demonstrate that Riemann's hypothesis is in fact false.

Why did Jiang bother to notify a lowly literary blog of his epochal discovery?
Therein lies a tale — and here the story starts to get even more mystifying. (If
you're wondering what the Reimann Hypothesis even is, click on the review of the
Rockmore book above for an explanation.)

For if the Reimann Hypothesis is in fact proven to be false, the entire field of
mathematics would be shaken to its core. So one would imagine that such a discovery
would be greeted with great fanfare (or great alarm, depending on which side you
are rooting for). Yet instead, Jiang's paper met with an echoing silence from the
mainstream mathematical community. As a result, he took it upon himself to send out
his proof to anyone anywhere who might conceivably be interested — including, oddly,
Dibs!.

To the untrained eye, Jiang's proof seems mighty impressive, filled with
incomprehensible equations and confident proclamations. Why then has it been roundly
ignored by the gatekeepers of mathematical knowledge? Since the average person does
not have the background to judge the quality of Jiang's work, we must rely on the
experts to tell us if he really has succeeded in smashing one of the pillars of
modern mathematics. And what do the experts have to say? Zilch. They don't even
answer the doorbell.

One possible explanation for this is that Jiang is so wrong that his “disproof”
doesn't even need debunking. The only clue to this possibility is a discussion at
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Riemann_hypothesis#Disproof_of_Riemann.27s_hypothesis.3F)
about the Reimann Hypothesis in which a commenter named Winfried Aschauer vigorously
dismisses Jiang's paper as “very strange” and “rubbish” and that any minutes spent
reading the paper was “wasted time”.

But aside from this one naysayer of unknown authority, one cannot find any mathematician
or publication online willing to discuss the merits of Jiang's claim. In frustration,
he has allowed the fringe-y “Institute for Basic Research” — an outside-the-mainstream
science organization in Florida — to publish his paper, since no one else would.

International biases also come into play, as Jiang is only one of many Chinese scientists
over the last few decades who feel their work has been shunned by the West; though there
has been some acknowledgement of Chinese discoveries in the last few years, many Chinese
scientists must feel as if they are operating in a parallel universe. Could Jiang be
ignored by the Western mathematical establishment simply because he is Chinese?

The story ends here, in limbo. We — the unwashed masses — don't know if the Reimann
Hypothesis has been disproven, or instead if an eccentric professor in China is suffering
from delusions of grandeur. And if this accursed silence continues much longer, we may
never know.

原文:http://www.dibsblog.com/?p=197




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