2. How to focus in clutch moments
3. Is the Riemann hypothesis being solved? More here, on de Branges (gated, but excerpted in the comments section).
4. The latest books on happiness
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Incidentally, Yashowanto Ghosh is in no way an independent expert. De Branges was not his thesis advisor, but Ghosh was a student at Purdue who studied extensively with de Branges. (See for example Sabbagh’s book on the Riemann hypothesis.) Also, Ghosh has never published in this area – his two papers deal with probability theory. So Ghosh’s opinion is interesting to know but not all that convincing, especially with the caveat about lacking “some technical details”.
Every time de Branges claims to have solved the Riemann hypothesis, someone writes a news article about it. He might be right this time, and I certainly can’t prove otherwise, but I wouldn’t count on it.
I’ve never met de Branges, but I’ve heard him speak. He’s an extremely bitter man, who even in his lectures spends a lot of time complaining that nobody takes him as seriously as he deserves. It’s a sad situation.
As a mathematician, I’ll say this:
1. Most mathematicians, fairly or not, view de Branges as sort of a crank. He keeps claiming that he’s solved it.
2. He’s made false claims of proving other important conjectures before, as well as untested claims.
3. OTOH, he did prove the Bierbach Conjecture in 1984, which is really something. Even then people didn’t take that proof seriously at first because of him crying wolf earlier on other results.
4. Most mathematicians don’t really understand de Branges’s work or methods, and he doesn’t make it easy to do so at all. Oftentimes the only people who understand the methods are people who studied at Purdue.
5. Several eminent mathematicians I know have said something along the lines of “Maybe he’s proven it, maybe not. I don’t care until someone else checks it, but I don’t have the time or want to do so myself.”
Today’s slashdot post
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/20/1728236
is based on this blog post. Sorry I forgot to link here – hit the submit button too soon.
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