Sunday, October 07, 2007
JSH: Millions of dollars in research funds at stake
So the real truth is that I have a proof so easy that it relies at its crucial point on the distributive property itself.
I also had publication of a key paper, and the weird yanking of it, and the death of the math journal a little later and the running away of its hosting university from any mention of it.
The published paper had been looked over by Barry Mazur, Andrew Granville, and Ralph McKenzie among others before it ever was published by SWJPAM.
So if it's all so easy, why haven't mathematicians acknowledged the result?
Because it collapses a previously held view at a "core" level which forces a re-thinking of a lot of research impacting the career of EVERY number theorist around the world. EVERY ONE of them is impacted.
Millions of dollars in research funding in number theory is impacted as well, so there are millions of dollars worth of reasons for number theorists to avoid this result and they clearly are willing to take the rest of the mathematical world down with them.
And the rest of the mathematical world is letting them.
Math journals do not just implode, or I like what I said earlier today, spontaneously combust.
If you people want to be known as flaky, and for the world to eventually know that mathematicians can use abstruseness to hide results then when you wake up to a world where you are not believed then you must know you did it to yourselves.
History shows that these idea wars end in one way: the discoverer eventually wins.
Yes, it can take decades at times, but I'm working to make sure it doesn't.
Betray the search for knowledge betting that your career can wander through a normal path, and yes, maybe you'll win as decades pass and false mathematical ideas hang on for as long as they can, if that's worth something to you, but if you do not, and the world asks for accountability, how can you still be considered a mathematician by it?
At a minimum you lose that title and what goes with it.
I also had publication of a key paper, and the weird yanking of it, and the death of the math journal a little later and the running away of its hosting university from any mention of it.
The published paper had been looked over by Barry Mazur, Andrew Granville, and Ralph McKenzie among others before it ever was published by SWJPAM.
So if it's all so easy, why haven't mathematicians acknowledged the result?
Because it collapses a previously held view at a "core" level which forces a re-thinking of a lot of research impacting the career of EVERY number theorist around the world. EVERY ONE of them is impacted.
Millions of dollars in research funding in number theory is impacted as well, so there are millions of dollars worth of reasons for number theorists to avoid this result and they clearly are willing to take the rest of the mathematical world down with them.
And the rest of the mathematical world is letting them.
Math journals do not just implode, or I like what I said earlier today, spontaneously combust.
If you people want to be known as flaky, and for the world to eventually know that mathematicians can use abstruseness to hide results then when you wake up to a world where you are not believed then you must know you did it to yourselves.
History shows that these idea wars end in one way: the discoverer eventually wins.
Yes, it can take decades at times, but I'm working to make sure it doesn't.
Betray the search for knowledge betting that your career can wander through a normal path, and yes, maybe you'll win as decades pass and false mathematical ideas hang on for as long as they can, if that's worth something to you, but if you do not, and the world asks for accountability, how can you still be considered a mathematician by it?
At a minimum you lose that title and what goes with it.
# posted by James Harris @ 16:09 
