Re: When a mathematician makes a mistake...


Dopey wrote:
How embarrassing is it if a mathematician submits a paper
to a preprint archive and then it is found (either by the author
or someone else) that there is a mistake?

(I mean one that is difficult to see even by experts, not
something completely ridiculous).

Do people think they were lazy or stupid not to have realised?
That they can't be good mathematicians and are letting
everyone down? Or is it quickly forgotten as something fairly
respectable and routine?

Nobody seems to think any less of Andrew Wiles, just because
there was such a mistake in the first version of his proof of part
of the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture (and hence of FLT). He
agreed that it was a mistake, and a while later he published
a correct proof. Nobody holds the mistake against him.
--

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