Comments on: Goedel’s Theorem is True

By: vitop

vitop — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 23:08:28 +0000

I’d tend to assume that there’s more crank at Arxiv than reliable science and mathematics. Although I’ve never really looked too closely either.

By: PeterMcB

PeterMcB — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 16:56:27 +0000

The model theorist, Wilfrid Hodges, once wrote a nice paper about the many submissions he’d received as editor of the “Bulletin of Symbolic Logic”, purporting to show that Cantor’s theorem about the non-countability of the reals was false. He concluded that there are many people out there, often philosophers rather than mathematicians, who find this counter-intuitive result so shocking, that they set to to find the error. The fact that for a century mathematicians have looked at Cantor’s proofs and found no errors, and indeed, have developed their own independent proofs of the result, does not deter them. Rather it motivates them, as this is their chance to leave their name on history — to overturn a century of error and waywardness.

The article details are:

@ARTICLE{hodges:bsl98,
author = “Wilfrid Hodges”,
title = “An editor recalls some hopeless papers”,
journal = “Bulletin of Symbolic Logic”,
year = “1998”,
volume = “4”,
number = “1”,
pages = “1–16″}

By: michael

michael — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 05:41:21 +0000

Holy Crap. The jibberish made my head throb. That letter must have been from that “other” mathematician Anthony Wiles or Andrew Wiles is a far greater crank-baiter than I could EVER imagine.

Reading a reference to a statement that an axiom is “false” makes my eyeballs hurt.

By: sigfpe

sigfpe — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 23:24:51 +0000

> I have a hard time believing though that someone actually read that
> entry title and took it at face value.

This is a great story that shows how many people are prepared to read something like that at face value.

By: michael

michael — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 16:56:34 +0000

And just so we are safe, I meant ridicule of the Arxiv author, not thedude.

By: michael

michael — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 16:53:05 +0000

Someone was apparently a little tightly wound. The problem of course is that the import of your last sentence “There you have it.” was missed, because they left off the implied sardonic inflection. I have a hard time believing though that someone actually read that entry title and took it at face value.

This site is about mathematical commentary as well as reporting. Ridicule can be commentary.