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Indian Mathematician Takes Shot At Proving Riemann Hypothesis
First time accepted submitter jalfreize writes "Indian Mathematician Rohit Gupta (known by the moniker @fadesingh on twitter) has announced an online workshop which he intends to 'conclude by attacking an important problem in front of (the participants), in public view.' The problem is the Riemann Hypothesis, first proposed in 1859. Rohit outlines his approach based on quasicrystals first outlined by Freeman Dyson. His audacious plan, coupled with this recent news about quasicrystals, has kicked up a storm of interest in the Indian twitterverse."
Hot proof action! In public!
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Ramanujan said the goddess Lakshmi read the answers to him out of a book.
This seems interesting but details are hard to find. All I can ascertain is that the fee is 4900 INR (~110 USD). The start date appears to be Oct 19th, but there's no estimate of the schedule except a listed end date of May 5th 2016. There's similarly no information about the delivery format. If anyone has more info, please post here.
Heh, they did much more than that. Which is why I added "/epic troll" to the end of my post. I am essentially fucking around with mods who lack a sense of humor and only read the first 3 words of a post before modding someone down.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...the only place you'll soon be able to afford medical care. :-P
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Looks like someone is trying to curry favor with the mods.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
He will talk about quasicrystals and the Riemann hypothesis, not lambda calculus.
Two of the major problems (Fermat's Last Theorum and the Poincaire Conjecture) have been cracked in recent times. A third major breakthrough is not impossible, particularly in a nation that has produced some superb minds in the past.
True, India has developed a bad reputation as a result of the call centers and the crappy software engineering, but that's like dissing the engineers developing the PCI Express and HyperTransport specifications because GM can't make a decent car or Bank of America can't provide anything remotely close to service. The subjects are wholly unrelated and you can draw no conclusions about one from the other. (India still runs a better train service than Amtrak, though that should not be considered credit to either.)
Mathematics doesn't require advanced infrastructure and is better done in peace with no distractions.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As an American-born Asian Indian, I know the pain of real racism. But a lot of what people like you consider to be "racism" has absolutely nothing to do with actual racism, and in fact has nothing to do with race at all!
It's understandable why many people in Western nations have a bad opinion of Indians, especially when technology or science is involved. No, English-speaking Americans won't be happy at all when they call some tech support line, trying to get help with a critical problem, only to have some guy who speaks English horribly answer. It's worse when this fellow lies and claims that his name is "Steve", although it's clear from his heavy accent that that is not likely his name.
It also won't help the reputation of Indians when the aforementioned tech support calls don't actually resolve the problem, and are instead extremely tedious follow-the-script time wasting sessions. It's even worse for those of us who dealt with good, American-based tech support in the past. In the 1980s, I knew I could call a tech support hotline and get somebody who knew English and who knew the product, and I'd usually be off the phone with the problem resolved within 10 minutes. That has never happened since the major push to outsource call centers to India and other third-world countries.
For those people who have had to deal with off-shore outsourcing software developers in India, there'll be a whole new set of horrible experiences to recount. Whether it's the shitty quality of the software they produce, or whether it's the lies about the current progress, or whether it's just the overall ineptitude, it's almost never a good experience for the Americans.
Even the typical college student will likely have had to deal with an Indian professor or professor's assistant who speaks in a way that cannot be understood, or otherwise is unable to properly teach or assist with the course material.
So it should be clear why many Westerners don't hold Indians in high esteem. When the only interactions go extremely badly for the Westerners, all of the time, it's no wonder that they won't respect Indians, and won't want to deal with Indians. Making incorrect accusations of "racism" won't help the situation, either. Doing so totally ignores the root cause of the problem, which isn't race, but rather an endless stream of awful interactions.
Riemann Hypothesis Takes Shot At Crushing Indian Mathematician
The Riemann Hypothesis (known by the moniker @unsolvable on twitter) has announced an online workshop which it intends to 'conclude by attacking an important mathematician in front of (the participants), in public view.' The mathematician is the Rohit Gupta. The hypothesis outlines its approach based on previous failed attempts, conserved in quasicrystals of the tears of previously broken mathematicians. Its audacious plan, coupled with this recent news about quasicrystals, has kicked up a storm of interest in the Indian twitterverse.
And the mods would like to have a little chaat with him.
I have great respect to mathematics. Itâ(TM)s one of the few disciplines left were bs doesnâ(TM)t fly (for long), unlike, for example, economics and political science.
This is a cheap publicity stunt, nothing more. Mathematics is not dancing with the stars or what not. This is a serious scientific problem a century and a half old. If you make a mistake in your âoeproofâ, the public wonâ(TM)t be able to notice. He hopes to be able to publicly claim success, even if his solution will be disproved later (with much less publicity). The proper way to do this is to publish your proof in a peer-reviewed journal and wait to see if other mathematicians find a flaw in your argument. His approach is cheap, unscientific publicity stunt.
I got bored this afternoon and did the proof a few different ways. Unfortunately, the details won't fit in this comment box.
That's sure not my experience with Indians. So what if someone on a call center doesn't know jack? Most of them here in the US don't either.
The Indian students here at the university I work at have always been excellent and fun to work with. (My fave joke from one of them: "The British gave us bureaucracy. But we PERFECTED it.")
We won't be having naan of this around here!
Ice Cream has no bones.
The Riemann Hypothesis is roughly the following: There's a function defined by zeta(s)= 1 + 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + 1/4^s... You can make this function make sense for any complex number as long as it has real part greater than 1. However, this series does not converge for s less than or equal to 1 1. However, it turns out that this function has what is called an "analytic continuation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_continuation. Essentially it is possible to make a function on the complex plane that is smooth (in the sense of being infinitely differential), and agrees with this function everywhere. This function is known as the Riemman Zeta Function. The only caveat is that one cannot give a sensible definition for the value at s=1. (Essentially as s gets near 1, the value of the function goes to infinity).
It turns out that the behavior of zeta is deeply related to the prime numbers because of another way of writing the above series as a product over the prime numbers. So for example, a major triumph of 19th century math was showing that this function was not zero anywhere on the line with real part of s =1. This implied an approximate estimate for the size of the nth prime number called the prime number theorem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem.
The Riemann hypothesis is a much stronger claim about where the zeta function is zero. It turns out that it is very easy to show that the zeta function is zero at every negative even integer. These are the trivial zeros, There are other, more difficult to locate zeros. The hypothesis conjectures that these zeros all lie on the line with real part equal to 1/2. That is, every zero is of the form 1/2 + it where t is some real number. If this is true many nice things will follow.
Most people who have thought about this question believe that it is true. There's a lot of evidence for it, such as the fact that literally billions of zeros have been located on this line, and the fact that it can be shown in a certain sense that almost all the non-trivial zeros lie near the 1/2 line. We also know that in a certain sense a positive fraction of the non-trivial zeros need to lie on the line (one needs to be careful here with what this means since there are infinitely many such zeros).
There are a lot of current attempts to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, and some very serious mathematicians think that the quasicrystal approach might work. Right now there are a lot of different approaches, including some which connect the hypothesis to certain claims in quantum mechanics. However, at this point, despite the many attempts there are a lot of weaker claims that we can't prove that we'd expect to prove before the Riemann hypothesis. It turns out that all the non-trivial zeros need to have a real part strictly between 0 and 1. But we can't even prove what essentially amounts to the worst case scenario, that there are zeros arbitrarily near the 0 and 1 lines. I expect this to be dealt with well before the full Riemann hypothesis is proven. There are other weaker hypotheses that are implied by RH that one would also expect to be proven first. So far the quasicrystal approach sounds promising but has had very little in the way of actual fruit. But this may just be that it is a relatively new set of tools and they need to be carefully developed. Overall, I'd be surprised if this project works simply because even if a quasicrystal approach eventually proves the full result it will require so much stuff to happen before hand.
No more pun jabs please.
Oi! I'm Scottish and I resent the implication that we didn't invent it.
Surely DEEP-FRIED MARS BAR tikka masala?