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kken

Kinda strange, I cannot find the manuscript and not even his homepage (http://otelbaev.com) is updated.

Wouldn't one expect this to be reported either after a successful peer review or after publication of a preprint?

His citation index is not very convincing either http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CU2sU8YAAAAJ

Smells fishy.

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Basing opinion on citation index is like saying if this person is not widely cited he is likely to be wrong. From what I know, it is common for researchers in US and EU to cite each other. However work from say China or other Asian/African nations is not cited as often.

I know many (well-established) professors who don't bother updating their webpage. In fact some of them wouldn't have eve bothered keeping a webpage had it not been for the courses.

That said I will take this news with a grain of salt because it is not an easy problem and definitely needs a through review.

Well the Kazakh press (inform.kz) seems to take it as fact that a Kazakh mathematician has solved the problem, so there's that.

>Basing opinion on citation index is like saying if this person is not widely cited he is likely to be wrong.

No, it does not say that.

Having published for 40 years with only very few citations means that his works were either irrelevant or only found extremely limited circulation. Both makes the claims less trustworthy. However, on the other hand, Perelman...

Perelman wasn't an academic nobody. He was a Miller fellow at Berkeley, and had visiting positions at the Courant Institute and Stony Brook. When he left the academic system, he had job offers at Princeton and Stanford.

TL;DR People who work on geometry knew Perelman pretty well.

>His citation index is not very convincing either http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CU2sU8YAAAAJ

>Having published for 40 years with only very few citations means that his works were either irrelevant or only found extremely limited circulation. Both makes the claims less trustworthy.

while i don't know anything about this guy, beside one in 1976, the Google citation index seems to show only ones in current century.

Quick search from other link http://www.ecosecretariat.org/ftproot/High_Level_Meetings/Su... :

"He contributed in the development of mathematics, for which he was awarded to the prize of the Department of physics-mathematical sciences of AS [Academy of Sciences] of USSR in 1990. He published 200 scientific papers and monographs."

I'm sure that this guy did have at least some citations between 1976 and 2000 :)

Very weak assumptions. It's Kazakhstan. You might find it surprising but not the whole world is US-centric. They mainly publish in Russian, he probably have strong connections with russian institutes and unless you can access/check/verify publications in russian, your opinion is quite out of place.

Which assumptions were weak? I'm not sure what the comment has to do with the US, but the Russophone world is well aware of the importance of this problem to the effect that one would expect news of any consensus on the validity of this approach to percolate to the Anglophone world almost immediately. My Russian is pretty terrible, but my math is decent enough, and the article spends at least the first 12 pages motivating the problem and defining standard notions that any undergraduate should be familiar with. This is another red flag.

I was surprised by the long motivation aswell. OTOH, spending 12% of a paper with the motivation does not sound excessive. That said, I don't understand much, due to not knowing Russian and not in depth knowledge about the topic.

http://www.math.kz/images/journal/2013-4/Otelbaev_N-S_21_12_...

It is in Russian

Many math-professors from LMSU write and publish in Russian, so US-centric citation indexing may not reflect the true picture. Moreover in that paper, all of his self-cited papers are in russian.

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