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Comment by zakk | Hacker News Reader

I see many red flags here:

- The author claims no academic affiliation.

- The title of the paper sounds a bit unusual, the gap is not a property of a prime, is a property of a couple of primes. Also, there's no need to specify 'exactly', that's number theory.

- In general the language used throughout the paper does not follow that of a mathematics paper.

- No LaTeX, extremely minimal bibliography.

These red flags mean nothing if the result is correct, and I would love it to be correct. I don't have time to check the proof, even if it seems to rely on elementary constructions.

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> No LaTeX, extremely minimal bibliography.

I prefer TeX! And I've published applied math with just TeX, sent to Information Sciences, an Elsevier journal, and they handled the TeX source easily!

I prefer TeX because Knuth's book is shorter and easier to read than the books on LaTeX.

Yes, for TeX I wrote about 100 macros for table of contents, cross references, help with bibliographies, ordered, unordered, and simple lists, boxes around text, etc.

So, it's not all just LaTeX guys -- TeX is still darned nice!

Nothing comes between me and my TeX!

Give up TeX? It will have to be pried out of my cold, dead fingers!

I wrote my thesis in LaTeX, there was at least minimal support at our PhD office (minimal in the sense of they would accept postscript at the time). My choices were MS Word (in early 90s, so ... yuck) which I didn't have on any machine I had access to, or LaTeX. So LaTeX it was.

I wound up using some of the APS macros, and a number of things I wrote.

For me, the cool part of this is that my thesis was built using a multi-pass makefile. I ran it on all of my machines (SGI Indy, OS2 laptop) at the time.

Since then I've written documentation for 2 projects in LaTeX. It worked quite well, but then I was forced into using the dark side's tools (Word) as none of my colleagues were versed in the finer side of (La)TeX.

One reason I avoided LaTeX is that I was unsure just how my macros would conflict with what was in LaTeX.

I'm sure LaTeX has a lot of super tricky stuff that does really good stuff and was too much work for me to implement, but with LaTeX if something went wrong then I'd be stuck-o since I would not be able to debug LaTeX.

So, TeX it is. If there are bugs in my macros, then I fix the bugs.

Yes, I got around to TeX in about 1998 on OS/2. Now on Windows, It's my standard for all more serious word whacking, of course, especially for anything mathematical.

My TeX setup has a converter from TeX's DVI file type to PDF, and my Adobe Acrobat reader can print to FAX, and my computer has a FAX modem card I run my land line phone through. So, net, I can send letters from TeX to Congress!

If you are interested in the problem, then only flaws in the logic are red flags.

If you are not interested in the problem, why did you click the link?

Disclaimer, I am not interested in the problem (but a bit interested in how the link get to the top here).

> then only flaws in the logic are red flags.

Sure, but the mathematics community knows that some red flags like the ones I pointed out, have an extremely high correlation rate with a wrong proof.

That's not enough to claim correctness or wrongness, and that's why I just spoke of "red flags".

> If you are not interested in the problem, why did you click the link?

I am very interested in the problem. However I am not interested in a thorough verification of the proof, which would take days.

Exactly as I am interested in some software projects, but I am not interested in performing a complete audit of their source code.

"These are red flags unless this is correct in which case just kidding."

So why doesn't someone here verify the proof in itself rather than critique the author's typesetting?

Time. It takes time. There is a lot of quackery out there. Theoretical physicists deal with quacks all the time.

I wouldn't call it quackery. It's mad people doing proofs that sound good in their heads.

Or sometimes naive people doing the same.

Depends on how much you are hanging the definition of quackery on the presence of intentional fraud and charatanism.

I meant the usual inventors that claim to be on the verge of becoming miraculously rich after the miraculous achievment of building an unlimited energy or propulsion machine, but alas there is still some small issue.. I'd love to show you, but you'll need to sign this NDA first.

When an aquaintance of mine started doing this, trying to build a perpetual motor using magnets and suction pumps, and insisting I join his madness by signing a NDA, over and fucking over, refusing to get a job to support his family, feeding them dreams of riches that are born only of a psychological inadequacyand need to be special..

well pooh.

At least this proof didn't come with an NDA :-)

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