Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong (opens in new tab)

I made the mistake of writing a short series of blog posts about unsolved math problems a few years ago. It seemed innocent enough at the time, but I still get "proofs" submitted today. I'm a programmer, not a mathematician, so in a lot of cases I don't even know enough to be able to tell people why they're wrong (other than the fact that they submitted their proof of Goldbach's conjecture to a programming blog).

Using logic to "prove" God exists isn't totally crazy, just mostly crazy. Gödel himself tried his hand at it [1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_ontological_proof

Perhaps you're correct, but I would say this article is the author explaining his criteria, and asserting that it might be useful for some other people, on both sides of the line.

Given that, I suspect that in one, two, five hundred years neither he nor his blog will be around. Nor anybody who read his blog. Even if his text had survived (perhaps someone goes digging though the NSA archives in a few hundred years), I'm sure that the person reading it will just intelligently substitute in the succeeding technology.

So, what I'm trying to say is that the point about TeX is just a point of practicality. It happens to be approximately true right now, and the author has no information to guide him to an alternate conclusion.

TeX is evolving with LuaTeX appearing to get some momentum. Given that almost no one uses TeX directly, I'd expect the biggest change would involve a gradual "improvement" in the macro library. It may even result in an embedded TeX à la sweave.

Wolfram is hammering against the interactive element with CDF and I could see TeX being extended to support a more dynamic electronic document format if HTML rendering engines continue to be typographic messes. Perhaps an LLVM-type backend to generate executable ebooks would be an interesting project, but I'm not sure I'd start with TeX except for math markup.

I would hope my prediction of the death of TikZ and PGF would come true soon enough, though.

It wouldn't surprise me if they still use it in a hundred years. It just fits thinking in math. By then TeX will be on version number 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751 :-).

Make sure to include a tl;dr, 'cause ain't nobody got time for that.

Browsers will still support HTML5 and JavaScript when you finally get around to proving RH? Optimistic! ;)

Skimming, sure. But really reading the paper, ie confirming its soundedness, requires going through most if not all the ideas and steps presented. Depending on the paper it can take weeks or even months. The ten tests in the OP take at most a few hours, I think.

No, not really. One thing that makes an expert an expert is their ability to filter signal from noise. Sometimes they can prematurely bucket ideas into relevant/not-relevant, but usually not.

Have you ever seen a novice programmer trying to find information on a StackOverflow page? The answer might be staring them in the face, but they still scroll past it once, twice, three times, etc. until I point it out.

A novice has no sense of what's important and what's not so they tend to think everything is whereas an expert has a set of heuristics (like the ones in this blog) which make them much faster. They'll look for familiar ideas, themes, likely mistakes, etc. first before going into full-on, read-this-thing-line-by-line mode.

Lightly reading a paper and working to understand it are two different things, especially for a potentially groundbreaking work.

So what you're saying is that these non-TeX users are unlikely to successfully solve P=NP? I'd say that sort of upholds his premise.

The SIGHCI/CHI community is noted for using Word more often than not. It is ironic for a field that is supposedly well connected to design to have such horrible looking papers on average.

Maybe history. Or another of the humanities. :) But TeX takes time to learn to use properly and only people that expect to use it regularly go through the trouble I'd expect.

A conference on Microsoft Office?

I probably wouldn't make a scrapbook with it.