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A friend of mine asked me yesterday about Santilli's isonumbers. I told him that it was quackery. As I based my answer only on the general reputation of the guy and had no knowledge of the subject, I decided to ask this question here.

Question: What is the isonumber? Did any serious mathematician spend any time looking at isomnumbers? What is the conclusion? References would be useful.

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  • $\begingroup$ I have no idea of what you are talking about, but a little research with google says www.i-b-r.org/docs/jiang.pdf, that seems something like a monograph. $\endgroup$
    – Ricky
    Jul 26, 2010 at 3:19
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    $\begingroup$ «Despite the achievement of the above epoch making generalizations of all pre-existing mathematical and physical theories [...]» That alone surely will get you a high Baez index... $\endgroup$ Jul 26, 2010 at 3:36
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    $\begingroup$ Good to know: math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html see also drbronner.com $\endgroup$
    – Will Jagy
    Jul 26, 2010 at 3:46
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    $\begingroup$ See sptimes.com/2007/05/09/Hillsborough/Snubbed_by_mainstream.shtml before answering this question $\endgroup$ Jul 26, 2010 at 4:52
  • $\begingroup$ @ Richard Good Warning! Although he seems to be more keen on his physical theories... $\endgroup$
    – Bugs Bunny
    Jul 26, 2010 at 5:43

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I looked at Jiang's monograph for a little while last night. Here is what I could get from it (I am now quoting from memory, so my terminology and notation may not be exactly the same). If $F$ is a field (of "numbers"), then the field $\overline{F}$ of "isodual numbers" has the same underlying set and addition operation, but multiplication is replaced by the operation $x \ \overline{\bullet}\ y := - (xy)$. The new multiplicative identity is $-1$.

This is mathematically valid, of course: i.e., $\overline{F}$ really is a field. Moreover it is isomorphic to $F$ via the map $x \mapsto -x$, although I couldn't find a clear statement of that. (But somewhat later on I saw references to the isotopy $F \rightarrow \overline{F}$.) Physically speaking, the isodual numbers are supposed to bear the same relation to the ordinary numbers as antimatter does to matter. (I don't know what that means, but I am not a physicist and so am not even going to worry about it.)

Jiang defines a new function $J_2(\omega)$, which is supposed to be some sort of repaired version of the Riemann zeta function. In one of his published works, he claims that the Riemann hypothesis is false -- in fact, he says, the zeta function has no zeros in the critical strip. [Logically speaking, wouldn't that make the Riemann Hypothesis true? Never mind.] From this definition, he immediately deduces proofs of Goldbach, twin primes, primes of the form $n^2+1$, and several other outstanding number theoretic conjectures -- literally immediately, in that I could find no argumentation for them. First these results are stated for "isonumbers" but later on they are stated for the usual integers.

That's about as far as I got. I also noticed, though, that many of the results described in this monograph were first published as papers by the journal Algebra, Groups and Geometries (founding editor: R.M. Santilli). These papers appear on MathSciNet but are not (going to be) reviewed.

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