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Wow, from the 2015 article: [A journal reviewer of his famous paper says]: "you should be careful. This guy posted a paper once, and it was wrong. He never pub
by cshimmin 4y ago
Wow, from the 2015 article:
[A journal reviewer of his famous paper says]: "you should be careful. This guy posted a paper once, and it was wrong. He never published it, but he didn’t take it down, either.’ ” The reader meant a paper that Zhang posted on the Web site arxiv.org, where mathematicians often post results before submitting them to a journal, in order to have them seen quickly. Zhang posted a paper in 2007 that fell short of a proof. It concerned another famous problem, the Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture, and he left it up because he hopes to correct it.
Looks like he might have lived up to that!
- hooloovoo_zoo 4y agoOne can't really take papers down from arXiv anyway.
- leethargo 4y agoWell, you can update them with a disclaimer that points out known issues.
- gavagai691 4y agoIf the proof is right, Zhang is in contention for greatest living mathematician with seven papers total, and on the basis of two of them (and should win all the major prizes he has not won yet and is still eligible for: Abel, Wolf, etc.). Would truly live up to Gauss' motto: "pauca, sed matura!"
- whytai 4y agoEven more incredible is that his own advisor refused to write him letters of recommendation upon graduation [1] After graduation, Zhang had trouble finding an academic position. In a 2013 interview with Nautilus magazine, Zhang said he did not get a job after graduation. "During that period it was difficult to find a job in academics. That was a job market problem. Also, my advisor [Tzuong-Tsieng Moh] did not write me letters of recommendation." ... Moh claimed that Zhang never came back to him requesting recommendation letters. In a detailed profile published in The New Yorker magazine in February 2015, Alec Wilkinson wrote Zhang "parted unhappily" with Moh, and that Zhang "left Purdue without Moh's support, and, having published no papers, was unable to find an academic job". In 2018, responding to reports of his treatment of Zhang, Moh posted an update on his website. Moh wrote that Zhang "failed miserably" in proving Jacobian conjecture, "never published any paper on algebraic geometry" after leaving Purdue, and "wasted 7 years of his [Zhang's] own life and my [Moh's] time". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang
- gavagai691 4y agoYes, if you want to see something incredible (in both the literal sense and the usual sense), read https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf (by Moh).
- ummonk 4y agoYeah I started reading that from the Wiki citation. Yikes. Academia is brutal.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoMan, it's so weird and pathetic All of these guys are probably a hundred times smarter than me or most of the other code monkeys working for the FANGMAN, but they're all squabbling over little 5-figure scraps of grant money.
- whytai 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake
- nequo 4y agoI think it’s their egos they’re squabbling over, not grant money.
- bigbacaloa 4y agoZhang evidently doesn't care about money at all. The same is true for many professonal mathematicians. Caring about money makes it difficult (not impossible) to do anything deep.
- m_nyongesa 4y agoIn the earlier version I saw (I guess it consists of the non-bold parts), he didn't mention as much negative stuff about Zhang. His claim that Zhang "want to be famous all the time" I regard with suspicion.
- data_maan 4y agoI think the word eligible is problematic, since it is actually aluding to age discrimination, which is what the Fields medal is doing and what should not be allowed.