Friday, April 28, 2006
JSH: So no, not heroes
So no, Wiles did not prove the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, as his approach fails a simple logic test, failing by Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc.
The only reason he could step through an approach that might appear to prove the conjecture—if he didn't make any other mistakes—is that there is a problem with ideal theory.
It doesn't work.
I can show the problem with some simple quadratic equations, and explain the logic of the method that proves it, by way of the distributive property.
My ideas are formally peer reviewed and published, but by way of some social crap—an email campaign—some sci.math'ers broke the journal process and got my paper yanked by a gullible chief editor.
And later the journal died.
I contacted Mazur with an early draft of the paper before it got published, and he commented on it, and asked a question.
Andrew Granville got a draft in his role as editor of the New York Journal of Mathematics.
A math grad student from Cornell University, after noting the arguments on newsgroups contacted me out of the blue, offering his help in resolving the situation. I doubted his honesty, but he was persistent, so I sent him a simplified version of what went in my paper, and watched as he re-wrote it in his own words.
At the end he begged off.
Your mathematical world lacks heroes.
The only reason he could step through an approach that might appear to prove the conjecture—if he didn't make any other mistakes—is that there is a problem with ideal theory.
It doesn't work.
I can show the problem with some simple quadratic equations, and explain the logic of the method that proves it, by way of the distributive property.
My ideas are formally peer reviewed and published, but by way of some social crap—an email campaign—some sci.math'ers broke the journal process and got my paper yanked by a gullible chief editor.
And later the journal died.
I contacted Mazur with an early draft of the paper before it got published, and he commented on it, and asked a question.
Andrew Granville got a draft in his role as editor of the New York Journal of Mathematics.
A math grad student from Cornell University, after noting the arguments on newsgroups contacted me out of the blue, offering his help in resolving the situation. I doubted his honesty, but he was persistent, so I sent him a simplified version of what went in my paper, and watched as he re-wrote it in his own words.
At the end he begged off.
Your mathematical world lacks heroes.
# posted by James Harris @ 00:09 
