Slashdot Mirror
Twin Prime Proof Erroneous
mindriot writes "The fairly recent perceived breakthrough in prime number theory regarding twin primes, as mentioned on slashdot, is apparently not quite perfect: 'On April 23rd, Andrew Granville of the Universite de Montreal and K. Soundararajan of the University of Michigan found a technical difficulty buried in one of the arguments in the preprint of Goldston and Yildrim. The main issue is that some quantities which were believed to be small error terms are actually the same order of magnitude as the main term. For now this difficulty remains unresolved.' A more detailed technical description is also available."
Nope, they lost me as well. Those people are Real geeks. :)
/. effect.
It would also appear that their server was a bit fragile, it isn't responding fast and I think it'll be succumbing to the
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
The last paragraph of the "more detailed technical description" is interesting (shown here in LaTeX notation):
The consensus is that the definition of $\gamma_R$ needs to be changed so that terms like this one do not appear. However, it is not obvious how to do this change. Work is continuing by Goldston and Yildirim and others to rectify the problem. It does seem reasonable to believe that an improvement on the current world record for small gaps between primes will be achieved by these methods; however, the more dramatic result $p_{n+1} - p_n < (\log n)^\alpha$ for some $\alpha < 1$ seems less likely.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it would be more clear if they said that the inequality above holds for infinitely many $n$, because it certainly couldn't hold for all $n$.
Essentially they're claiming that it's less likely now that the twin prime conjecture will ever be proved using this method, but there's still a pretty reasonable chance that the proof will result in something along the lines that there are infinitely many pairs of consecutive primes that differ only by x, where x is not quite as small as 2 (which is what the twin primes conjecture says) but x is smaller than any value of x that was previously proven. Which would be cool, but nothing to open champagne over.
heard this in an engineering class the other day... What's the contour integral around Western Europe? A: Zero, because all the Poles are in Eastern Europe!
Scott
How much more do we need to know about the causes for cancer or AIDS?
Shouldn't we be looking for the cures instead?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
42 retard
Damn, I forgot to carry the 1...
...that need better and more powerful mathematics.
Knowledge never is a waste of time.
I have no idea how this proof works because the server melted already.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Their webserver it seems, " is apparently not quite perfect:" It has already been /.ed
Obviously evidence of a conspiracy to cover up the mistakes in the theorem. Sssshhh!
Twin primes are two prime numbers that differ by a value of two - for instance, 17 and 19, or 29 and 31.
but the space that I'm allowed to type in here is too short.. :-)
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
To think you solved something like that, and to be ready to publish, after all that hard work.... then...... oops. guess that doesns't work
man. i feel sorry for those guys
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
aimath.org/primegaps/
aimath.org/primegaps/residueerror/
I'm still working on mirroring all 47 images, but the text is there, and the img tags have great alt text descriptions.
There is nothing trollish in the parent. It merely illustrated the problem with almost all posts that appear on math topic articles. This really isn't a site that mathematicians frequent, at least not ones past dilettante level.
Yeah, right, like I can imagine CmdrTaco rejecting a story because he read the math and found the error.
I see a lot about these sorts of massive mathematical problems. I can understand calculating pi to the nth point as it is used in calculations, but what sort of benefit does mankind get from working out twin primes? In fact, do primes do anything for us anyway?
I'm well aware of what primes are, I just have never found a use for them!
You are both wrong. Neither 42 nor 46 is a prime number.
This story doesn't have anything to do with SCO! Come on, where's today's SCO story? This isn't funny, man, I need my fix!
Yeah, i got that bit, it was the detailed proof that made my head hurt
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
If I knew I was going to get modded "Troll" I would have at least come up with a decent troll :P
Actually, I know a mathematics professor who has talked about reading on /.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Q: What did the constipated mathematician do?
A: He worked it out with a pencil!
Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An Abelian grape.
Q: Why do you never hear the number 288 on television?
A: It's two gross.
Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a rock climber?
A: Nothing. You can't cross a vector and a scalar.
Q. How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. 1, he gives the lightbulb to 3 engineers, thus reducing the problem to a previously solved joke.
Q: What's big, grey, and proves the uncountability of the reals?
A: Cantor's diagonal elephant.
Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?
A: Zorn's Lemon.
Q: What's yellow, normed, and complete?
A: A Bananach space.
Q: What is very old, used by farmers, and obeys the fundamental theorem of arithmetic?
A: An antique tractorisation domain.
Q: What is hallucinogenic and exists for every group with order divisible by p^k?
A: A psilocybin p-subgroup.
Q: What is often used by Canadians to help solve certain differential equations?
A: the Lacrosse transform.
Q: What is clear and used by trendy sophisticated engineers to solve other differential equations?
A: The Perrier transform.
Q: Who knows everything there is to be known about vector analysis?
A: The Oracle of del phi!
=======
Halfway through a recent airplane flight from Warsaw to New York, there was nearly a major disaster when the flight crew got sick from eating the fish. After they had passed out, one of the flight attendants asked over the intercom if there were any pilots in the cabin.
An elderly gentleman, who had flown a bit in the war, raised his hand and was rushed into the cockpit of the 747. When he got there, took the seat, and saw all the displays and controls, he realized he was in over his head. He told the flight attendant that he didn't think he could fly this plane. When asked why not, he replied,
"I am just a simple Pole in a complex plane"
So, they just had to rely on the method of steepest descents.
=======
You know that during the Great Flood, Noah brought along two of every species for reproductive purposes. Well, after a few weeks on the ark, all the couples were getting along fine, except for these two snakes. Day and night, Noah worried that this was going to mean the end of this species.
Finally when the flood ended and the ark hit ground, the two snakes darted out of the ship and headed to the nearest picnic table where they started to "go at it". It was then that Noah realized that...
Adders can't multiply without their log tables.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Yeah, right, like I can imagine CmdrTaco rejecting a story because he read the math and found the error.
[CmdrTaco] On page 17 the small thingy is just as big as teh big thingy, but its supposed to a small thingy, so that doesnt work. Next.
Yeah, right, like I can imagine CmdrTaco rejecting a story because he read the math and found the error.
Actually, the most probable result is that CmdrTaco read the story and didn't find the error, but the error's order of magnitude was too large and so it resulted in a dupe.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
And because all the digits are even, no matter what base they were written, you will still have an even number unequal 2, and hence will be not a prime.
We know that 42 is the answer, but we don't know what the question is. Clearly we haven't found the question yet.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
WOMEN = TIME x MONEY (Logical statement that women require time AND money - statement only TRUE when both "time" and "money" are TRUE)
TIME = MONEY ("Time is Money")
WOMEN = (MONEY)^2
MONEY = sqrt(EVIL) ("Money is the Root of all evil)
WOMEN = (sqrt(EVIL))^2
WOMEN = EVIL
Even the most precise calculations don't need that many digits of pi. It's amazing how fast orders of magnitude build up.
Take this extreme example. Suppose you know the radius of the galaxy (define the radius going out to the galactice halo, for instance) to arbitrary precision and your calculation of the circumference is limited only by the precision of pi. If you want to know the circumference town to 10^-15 meters (ie, about the size of an atomic nucleus). How many digits of pi are sufficient?
The radius of the Milky Way galaxy out to the galactic halo is about 65,000 light years, or about 6e20 meters. Only 36 digits of pi would be necessary!!! And this extreme example is of many orders of magnitude larger than precisions of anything that can be calculated in laboratories today. In actuality, one wouldn't really need more then 12-15 digits of pi, if even that much.
make world, not war
2+2 does equal 5, for sufficiently large values of 2.
:)
I love being a mth dork
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
If you're so damn good at factoring products of primes, factorise 18446743979220271189!
it's not pointless, that"s why you were modded down. Now don't ask ME what the point is, i really suck in mathematics (but stil love it though) but if you see somewhere the word 'prime', think computer en/decryption, et. c. i even guess it could be used for cancer research....
I've always had a problem with this proof, not because it claims that women are evil (which they surely are), but because the correct statement should read
WOMEN = TIME + MONEY
since time and money are independent.
What would be really important is to prove the Reimann Hypothesis. That would tell us a lot about the distribution of primes.
If I remember correctly:
;)
true + true = true
true + false = true
false + true = true
false + false = false
and
true x true = true
true x false = false
false x true = false
false x false = false
Which means that addition is like or'ing booleans together and multiplication is like and'ing booleans together. Therefofore, multiplication would seem to be the correct operation, as women are both time and money, not one or the other.
QED
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
sorry, slightly off topic.. but after having a bit of a look around here i've concluded that the most popular phrase on slashdot is 'order of magnitude' :x
Does anyone know if there are any known benefits to having infinitely many twin primes? Are there any unfinished proofs that depend upon this result or the negation thereof? Not there is anything wrong with researching interesting questions - sometimes seemingly idle questions like these can bring very important results, either from the final conclusion or from the process taken to reach the conclusion.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
But sqrt(EVIL^2) is multivalued. It can be EVIL or the complex conjugate of EVIL (EVIL being a complex thing).
Remember that an error was found when the British mathematician first announced that he had a proof of Fermat's Theorem a few years ago. He was able to fix it, however, and AFAIK his proof is currently considered sound (albeit LONG).
This post is dedicated to all of those
It was in here.
Unfortunately, I devoured it. Damn you Bill Cosby!
Perhaps all of the overwhelmingly humorous Slashdotters were also involved. All the laughter from your joke must have caused folks to spit all over their keyboard. In the process of cleaning up, they probably hit the reload button several times, tragically ruining the website. If you would kindly discontiue this, we will not have any future problems.
So among the nearly 700,000 Slashdot users, you can confirm that ... Oh you didn't say he has an account. You can confirm that of the million page views per day, one might possibly be from your Math Professor? That's nice. Obviously Slashdot has a much bigger Math following then previously thought. Hopefully math.slashdot.org will start up soon. Maybe they can come up with an even more offensive color scheme than games.slashdot.org.
"someone explain for us burnt out hippies please!"
read: someone explain for taco, michael, and chris, please.
lol :)
but oh so true... Just ran out of modpoints, too bad
Here I'll Show you how to factor 27159925611 into its primes
Just keep dividing by primes untill you get one that your number is divisible by
3
27159925611< 7
9053308537< 13
1293329791<
99486907
The result is a factor tree made of all primes, just like the ones you(or I at least) made in junior high
you can derive it from scratch for us...
I consider math at this level to be more like art and less like engineering.
You do it because the problem is beautiful and the solution is likely to be beautiful. If you are lucky the solution will turn out to be not only beautiful but also make a statement about life (or some aspect of life).
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I still wouldn't mind these guys helping me understand my calculus homework...
djb has an account. I know of at least one other mathematician with an account. But so what. The twin prime conjecture is not exactly motivic cohomology man. It was explained in a movie with that actress/singer with the big nose... I forget her name. It is a commonly known problem outside of mathematics, that is why it is news. Look at the press coverage that the FLT proof got, and yet the vast majority of the people who heard about it have no hope of ever understanding it. It is rather obvious that the vast majority of Slashdot users are complete morons. If you look at just about any article posted of a technical nature, most of the posts are either off topic, asking very basic questions about the topic, or explaining very basic concepts related to the topic. This is the problem that moderation was supposed to address, but it didn't work.
from the 2+2=5 dept
,
Step 1: -1/1 = 1/-1
Step 2: Taking the square root of both sides:
Step 3: Simplifying:
Step 4: In other words, i/1 = 1/i.
Step 5: Therefore, i / 2 = 1 / (2i),
Step 6: i/2 + 3/(2i) = 1/(2i) + 3/(2i),
Step 7: i (i/2 + 3/(2i) ) = i ( 1/(2i) + 3/(2i) ),
Step 8:
Step 9: (-1)/2 + 3/2 = 1/2 + 3/2,
Step 10: and this shows that 1=2.
therefore 2+2=1+1=3; QED
Thanks for the proof
Didn't the original proof say that there was no limit to the closeness of primes, rather than saying explicitly that twin primes exist to infinity? If I'm right, then it implies that there COULD be an infinite number of twin primes, but it doesn't mean there has to be.
An (American) Indian chief has three wives, all of them pregnant. One day, the village shaman prophesizes that all three women will not only give birth on the same day, but within the same hour! He then goes on to prepare a teepee with three animal skins: a deer, a bear, and a hippopotamus.
Well, the special day finally arrives when all three women go into labor. The shaman directs them to go to the specially prepared tent and each lie down on one of the animal skins.
The woman on the deer skin gives birth first, delivering a 7-pound baby boy.
The woman on the bear skin is next, birthing an 8-pound boy.
However, the woman on the hippopotamus skin, after extensive labor, pops out a 15-pound baby.
What's the moral of this story?
"The son of the squaw of the hippopotamus is equivalent to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides!"
[groan]
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
I am definitely not flaming Dominic the poster, but if all the moderators that read this post understood it then I'd be real freakin' suprised. "Oh look! symbols! [+1 Informative]
Fuck! <> Back to my job at the gas station, I guess....
We calculate PI to the gazillionth diget to see the pictures put there (as a long string of zeros and ones) by a super advanced intellegence.
I am definitely not flaming Dominic the poster, but if all the moderators that read this post understood it then I'd be real freakin' suprised. "Oh look! symbols! [+1 Informative]
:)
No offense taken!
Didn't you read the article, you idiot?
There is a nice distributed calculus that is trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis, it needs your spare cpu cicles for it.
If you can help, and maybe win the 1 million dollar price, take a look at www.zetagrid.net.
Alex
You disgrace us all!
I have a truly wonderful proof of this fact...
but this margin is too small to contain it.
The rest of the human race exists only to serve my needs. If you can't in some way make my life better, then please die, as you are only consuming resources that may possibly be of utility to me.
Pardon my honesty, good sir.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
+1 Right Fucking On!
Uh, yeah. So are my GPG keys safe or what?
yeah, i think we all agree that women are the complex variant of evil...
Since we're doing the "boolean" thing here, I guess this means that WOMEN can be NOT EVIL.
Looks like their theorem is "not ready for prime time!"
Go suck a penis fagz