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Prominent Mathematicians Rebuke Recent Riemann Hypothesis Proof

Bryan writes "Xian-Jin Li's purported proof of the Riemann Hypothesis (reported on recently) has been rebuked by Fields Medalist Terence Tao. Fortunately, Dr. Li's proof fails alongside a respectable graveyard of previous attempts." Relatedly, jim.shilliday writes "The proof cites and appears to be based in part on the work of the leading French theorist Alain Connes. A few hours ago, Connes posted a comment on his blog stating that the purported proof is so badly flawed that he stopped reading it."

3 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. I don't know about you all... by pongo000 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The "proof" is that of Theorem 7.3 page 29 in Li's paper, but I stopped reading it when I saw that he is extending the test function h from ideles to adeles by 0 outside ideles and then using Fourier transform (see page 31). This cannot work and ideles form a set of measure 0 inside adeles (unlike what happens when one only deals with finitely many places).

    ...but this certainly cleared things up for me!

  2. Lazy title selection by ActusReus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh come on, you were almost there! How about:

    "Renowned Researchers Rebuke Recent Riemann Reasoning"

  3. Re:Why "fortunately"? by Rudolf · · Score: 5, Funny

    [..] lead to the undermining of current encryption methods, which depend on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers.

    That's a trivial problem.

    All prime numbers have two factors: 1 and itself.

    Goodbye encryption :-)