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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

Math major here, but it's not my area. so I have to guess

Note that it's not a "per review paper", it's just a PFD shared somewhere, a "preprint" if you like a formal word.

It looks short (4 pages) and looks quite readable, so I guess that if you wait a week or two it will be a major new IF true.

My guess is it's false. It looks like the author made a similar claim two years ago and it's now fixing some details. With a loooooooooooooooooooong proof that is possible because only the author can understood it good enough to fix it, but with a proof that is so short a minor error would have been fixed soon.

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It looks like the author made the opposite claim three years ago:

http://math.ahu.edu.cn/_upload/article/files/85/03/f191ded54...

I'm not going to blame anyone because I make this all the time. Sometimes the poof that something is true or false are very similar. In this case the difference is if some value is 1/2 or 3/4. Anyway, my coworkers find the error before we publish it.

Someone reviewed that specific paper here [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220128195023/https://motls.blo...

This was a review of the author's earlier paper of 2018, in which they were actually claiming a proof of the RH.

On their arXiv page: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.12546, the author states that "though all my previous proposed (dis)proofs were flawed, i think the flaws pointed me towards the right direction..."

This is actually the 19th version of the paper the author has published in just over 2 years: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.12546

Being such a short paper if people in this field thought it was close to actually disproving the Riemann Hypothesis likely another mathematician could takes the proofs concept, fix it, publish it, and have it peer reviewed to snipe the claim of disproving the Riemann Hypothesis.

Fully agree. I guess there is still some honor and the other person would invite the original author as an author of the fixed paper, but it looks very snipable.

If there are no significant improvements to the paper by the "second" author, such acts of "sniping" might be treated by the math community as academic theft, and the second author might not get any credit at all. If anything, their reputation might be seriously damaged.

This is exactly what happened with Perelman's proof of the Poincare conjecture: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/08/28/manifold-desti...

Perelman and all the surrounding controversy is the most extreme examples in modern times and I feel the mathematical community has got much more accepting of group contributions in the last 2 decades.

But yes, if the proof is only missing easy plug-able gaps then likely a mathematician would reach out to the author so they could co-author the paper. Anything else would be rude.

I was more meaning in the case where the proof has some insight but not apply it in a way that actually disproves the Riemann Hypothesis.

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