Re: Fermat's Last Theorem
- From: quasi <quasi@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:36:24 -0400
On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:34:13 -0700 (PDT), OwlHoot
<ravensdean@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 19, 12:02 pm, quasi <qu...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 19 Apr 2008 06:22:59 EDT, "G.E. Ivey" wrote:
The really odd thing is that Mehran Basti received his Ph.D. from
Cambridge University in 1979 with a dissertation entitled
"Asymptotic Equivalence, Existence of Periodic Solutions and
Topological Equivalence of Systems of Ordinary Differential Equations"
One wonders what went wrong.
Psychosis.
quasi
Not necessarily. It's a bit rude of us to speculate on someone's
state of mind where they can actually read it;
Yes, I said it right to his face, not behind his back.
but any number of accidents or afflictions could affect the intellect,
from a car accident to frontal lobe epilepsy or of course a nervous
breakdown,
Sure, it could very well be physical. Still, he's crazy.
and perhaps the very single-mindedness that makes a
great academic can be a weakness in bad circumstances or if
taken to excess.
Absolutely -- many geniuses throughout history have gone off the deep
end.
I wonder if Mehran does have voluminous notes, just as he claims,
I believe he does. Perhaps 10,000 pages as he claimed earlier, or
perhaps 2,000 pages as he claimed recently -- hey, what's 8,000 pages,
give or take?
But do I believe that those notes could ever be converted to a form
which make sense to others? No way! I doubt that even _he_ could make
sense out of most of them.
but is paranoid about giving details here or on the web in case
someone publishes a paper incorporating his ideas.
His paranoia rings out loud and clear. He can be forgiven for that --
after all, ideas are easily stolen.
I can see how it could happen - In practice there's no guarantee
of priority except in an "official" journal or something like the arXiv.
Or a self-published book -- the book he claims he will eventually
write.
Even if one used one of those date-stamping services, in the
end what counts is who everyone believes had an idea first,
rather than what some lone voice claims on their own behalf.
Which is why he has to write the book, and stop talking about it.
Also, perhaps there is a remote connection between the Riccati
equation and FLT, via the Schwarzian derivative, and modular
functions [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riccati_equation ]
I'm sure there could be.
The _idea_ that a system of polynomial equations could be modeled by a
system of differential equations, and solved using the methods of
differential equations is a reasonable idea, but vague, and not
earth-shakingly original.
He talks about modeling polynomials as differential equations.
Presumably that means he has discovered how to add, subtract, and
multiply polynomials via their corresponding differential equations.
But can he factor polynomials? And if he can, can he do it more
efficiently than known methods? If so, he already has something of
value. If not -- if he can't even decide irreducibility, it's highly
unlikely that he can compute Galois groups (as he vaguely suggested),
or that he could solve diophantine equations which are currently
unsolved.
The guy is a kook, no question about it.
What does he actually want?
For one thing he wants students -- students who will pay _money_ for
the privilege of trying to untangle his mess of ideas.
He envisions himself as the head of an unofficial school, with loyal
students and proteges who will carry out the development and
implementation (i.e. -- programming) of his ideas.
But it's a scam. I'm not talking about the money -- he's not really
after the money -- he only wants enough to live on. I'm talking about
stealing people's time -- years perhaps. His credentials (PhD from
Cambridge) are the bait, creating the illusion of credibility.
If he just struggles on his own to self-publish, fine, I have no
problem with that. But in fact, he wants to lure others to into the
depths of his madness. To defend against that, his bluff needs to be
called, and his lunacy exposed.
quasi
.
- References:
- Re: Fermat's Last Theorem
- From: OwlHoot
- Re: Fermat's Last Theorem
- From: G.E. Ivey
- Re: Fermat's Last Theorem
- From: quasi
- Re: Fermat's Last Theorem
- From: OwlHoot
- Re: Fermat's Last Theorem
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