Re: My OPE & the Euclicidean TSP
JSH wrote:
It's a relatively simple proof given its impact but the gist of it is
that over a hundred years of number theory in a somewhat esoteric area
is wrong.
Kind of defeats the point in studying books in that area, eh?
My interpretation of this action, without knowing any specifics at all:
"Here, you may find that these books will help show you where the flaw
in your proof is."
Math journals don't keel over and die over a minor result.
All evidence I've been able to find seems to point to the fact that the
journal wasn't very well-read. When looking at CiteSeerX, out of the
three papers it had listed, only one had any citation outside of another
by the same author (and even then, but one citation). Most Google
results seem to be either referring to the P=NP paper or discussions
involving you. The ostensible reason for shutting down was a budget cut;
anecdotal evidence indicates that this is quite probably what happened.
My discovery is the biggest thing in number theory in over a century,
but it is horrendously invalidating, showing an esoteric arena in
"pure math" so it has no practical application, has this subtle error
that invalidates over a hundred years of mathematical research.
A "horrendously invalidating" discovery in a well-established field is
quite unlikely, as many people have indicated in sci.math over someone's
disproof of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem. The only examples I can
think of where major historical results where not shown to be absolute
truth are quantum mechanics and relativity, neither of which are
"horrendously invalidating," but results showing that Newtonian
mechanics isn't quite right at high speeds or large or small distances
although a good approximation in many cases.
--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth