Some of you may be interested in the following "slashdot" discussion from a day or two ago:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/03/1224243&mode=thread&tid=93&tid=134&tid=146 titled "Riemann Hypothesis Proved?" quoting a Swedish newspaper (apparently the major print news outlet in Sweden) which bases its story on an article "published" last year in arXiv.org, linking to: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0208221 This paper has been on the arXiv since August last year, with a couple of revisions. Where does it fit in as a proof or non-proof of the Riemann hypothesis? Will it actually receive any sort of refutation? It seems not to have been written with mathematicians in mind, particularly, and none of them in the various comments seem able to follow the methods used; most seem very skeptical. Is it right or wrong though? Nobody seems sure. Has it been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal? It seems not to have been published in one. If citations of this paper appear later, will they provide any evidence of its correctness or otherwise? If the arguments are refuted as a proof, will there be any link or indication of this on arXiv.org? How would a future "innocent" third party know what to do when coming upon a paper like this in the arXiv, if there is no follow-up (as there currently is none)? Normally, when a breakthrough of this magnitude (similar to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem) occurs, there is considerable publicity. In this case there seems to have been almost none since last August, until now. Is that because the authors are unsure themselves? Because the authors are unknown? Because nobody reads what's on the arXiv if they don't know the authors? Or because no peer-reviewed publication has been involved yet? Incorrect articles certainly get published in peer-reviewed journals as well, although at least in mathematics peer review tends to be quite rigorous. But there seems to be some rather serious distinction being made in this case - what is it, and what lessons should we draw? Arthur -------------------------------- [Moderator's Note] Relevent Threads: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1468.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2340.html
