The problem with journalism today

[lederhosen]

Well, one of them, is stuff like this. Thanks to djfiggy for an amusing read.

Summary for non-mathematicians: As reported by the Manila Times, a Filipino mathematician (who happens to be a former columnist of that paper) has disproved Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. On closer reading, Escultura's 'disproof' requires discarding two axioms* of number theory, which is fancy talk for "I am a crackpot".

And I can practically smell the tinfoil here: "Escultura’s refutation sparked much discussion on the Internet that has spilled over to other fields such as physics, astronomy, cosmology, intelligence, learning, chaos, turbulence, gravity and nonlinear analysis."

(I'm having trouble finding anything at UT for the "Bernard Ziegler of University of Texas, Houston" supposedly collaborating with Escultura; there does seem to have been a professor by that name at U. Arizona, who I suspect might be the guy they're referring to, but glancing at the search results he seems to be primarily a computer scientist working in modelling rather than a pure mathematician.)

The best bit, however, is Wiles' response :-)

*This shows that Escultura is a wuss, because I'm sure I could break Wiles' proof - or indeed any other - by losing just *one* of the axioms of number theory.

Comments

[tenner.livejournal.com]

Even better, there is no University of Texas-Houston.

There's a University of Houston.

There's a University of Texas-Houston Medical School, but the only thing this guy would be doing at a medical school would be trying to remove his head from his ass.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Even better, there is no University of Texas-Houston.

Well, *that* would explain why I couldn't find their website :-)

[harliquinn.livejournal.com]

Which would make this comment even more amusing:

Also I’d like to have the address of the guy who let you get a PhD 30 years ago. I’d like to discuss few things with him. .

[quatranoctal.livejournal.com]

Ten seconds into reading the article, and I'm just going to assume that the Completely Stupid Theorem they have put up in place of FLT is actually just a formatting error.

[quatranoctal.livejournal.com]

The result is a new real number system that is free from defects and contradictions, finite and enriched with new numbers that have important applications for physics.

Wow ... if you could just do that with the legal system, and remove all the laws that you didn't think were any good ...

And what the hell is "critique-rectification"? Is that just a fancy way of saying "Waaah! I don't like these axioms!"?

[djfiggy.livejournal.com]

I dunno, maybe he decided which axioms to critique by rolling an eight-sided die, tossing the axiom in question if the result of the roll was less than or equal to 4.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Otherwise it's rather easy to disprove.

Incidentally, the two axioms EEE considers to be broken are the one that states that an increasing series of real numbers that has an upper bound converges to some real number, and the one that states that any real number is exactly one of >0, =0, or <0.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

And the missing bit there is "less than 0", since muggins here forgot that a less-than sign is interpreted as a tag open...