Re: JSH: Mistakes happen

From: fishfry (BLOCKSPAMfishfry_at_your-mailbox.com)
Date: 07/18/04 

Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 22:38:50 GMT

In article <3c65f87.0407180806.6191474f@posting.google.com>,
 jstevh@msn.com (James Harris) wrote:

> Now a poster has found a minor series of mistakes in my APF paper, and
> I admit some chagrin. But mistakes happen. As an author you can
> write something and for a lot of psychological reasons (and just plain
> carelessness) miss mistakes.
>
> I don't know why I wasn't notified of that mistake by Ioannis Argyros,
> but given what I've seen from editors at Southwest Journal of
> Mathematics, I'm not surprised.
>
> There are now questions for all the papers published by that journal,
> and it might be time for me to notify the other authors given this
> latest issue.
>
> Now, even if the mistake had been noticed--as it should have been--and
> someone informed me, the fix is easy, so it wouldn't have been a big
> deal, but there's an important point here: even in a VERY short paper,
> apparently mathematicians can overlook mistakes.
>
> Yet, there are people with supposed proofs that are hundreds of pages
> long.
>
> How many people looked over my VERY SHORT paper and failed to notice
> the minor error? Sure it doesn't change the conclusion of the paper,
> but it does give pause.
>
> The reality is that human beings make mistakes.
>
> As long as mathematicians rely on human eyes to look over "proofs"
> then it's possible that errors remain, and they may not be minor.
>
> Now I'm a supposed "crank" with a lot of people hostile to me, who
> have a strong motivation to find errors in my work, and make a big
> stink about it, and you can see that with the poster currently making
> a big stink about this error that he found. I say kudos to him for
> finding the mistakes.
>
> I've acknowledged what are basically typos and given the fix.
>
> But Andrew Wiles is apparently a beloved member of a community that
> wants to believe, and *does* believe, in him.
>
> What makes any of you believe that a paper that's hundreds of pages
> long could really be just checked by human eyes and definitely not
> have a critical error?
>
> I say, groupthink. You want to believe.
>
> Computers need to check long math "proofs". There's just no objective
> way around that conclusion.
>
> Mistakes happen. And people can overlook them, for many reasons.
>

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