Timeline for Mathematicians whose works were criticized by contemporaries but became widely accepted later
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
44 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 5, 2019 at 14:10 | review | Close votes | |||
| Apr 5, 2019 at 15:56 | |||||
| Jan 8, 2019 at 21:17 | comment | added | Franz Lemmermeyer | "Gauss famously discarded Abel's proof" seems to come from wikipedia's article on Abel via Weisstein, where we "learn" that Gauss believed it "to be the worthless work of a crank". I honestly have no idea why people write such a piece of crap without checking any sources.at all. The English version of wikipedia is literally filled with similar nonsense. | |
| Mar 17, 2013 at 18:13 | answer | added | David Jordan | timeline score: 8 | |
| Mar 2, 2013 at 18:12 | answer | added | Hans | timeline score: 0 | |
| Feb 22, 2013 at 5:08 | vote | accept | Nilotpal Kanti Sinha | ||
| Feb 22, 2013 at 5:09 | |||||
| Feb 17, 2013 at 14:55 | vote | accept | Nilotpal Kanti Sinha | ||
| Feb 17, 2013 at 15:00 | |||||
| Feb 14, 2013 at 16:08 | answer | added | practical | timeline score: 3 | |
| Feb 13, 2013 at 22:17 | comment | added | Toby Bartels | We should distinguish between work that was rejected as wrong and work that was rejected as uninteresting or useless. With Grothendieck, for instance, people may have found his work too abstract to be of interest or to be not real mathematics, but I doubt (although I could be wrong) that anybody believed his results to be incorrect. | |
| Feb 13, 2013 at 12:59 | answer | added | Nick Matteo | timeline score: 67 | |
| Feb 13, 2013 at 2:01 | answer | added | Mark S | timeline score: 13 | |
| Feb 13, 2013 at 1:27 | comment | added | Margaret Friedland | @Thomas Riepe: the story is not unknown, I heard it first from Dennis Sullivan. While I was a visiting assistant professor at KU in 2008-11, I got hold of the book mentioned (written by onetime professor in the department, named Price) and read about Grothendieck and Aronszajn. Sadly, I do not have a copy. There is also a preprint by Grothendieck from that time in one of the libraries there. Anyway, the people in the department with most knowledge of these events seem to be Tyrone Duncan and Bozena Pasik-Duncan, so I suggest contacting them if needed. MO member Hailong Dao may help, too. | |
| Feb 13, 2013 at 1:24 | answer | added | Joël | timeline score: 47 | |
| Feb 13, 2013 at 0:44 | answer | added | Casteels | timeline score: 6 | |
| Feb 13, 2013 at 0:42 | comment | added | Thomas Riepe | @Margaret Friedland - this may be interesting for Winfried Scharlau or Leila Schneps who work on a Grothendieck bio. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 23:45 | answer | added | Deane Yang | timeline score: 9 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 23:29 | comment | added | Margaret Friedland | Grothendieck gained quite a reputation as a functional analyst before he switched to algebraic geometry. In 1955 he was invited by Nachman Aronszajn to visit University of Kansas. It is there that he started developing new ideas on schemes. There is an account of the results of his visit to Lawrence, KS in a mimeographed (never oficially published) history of the math department at KU. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 23:15 | answer | added | Margaret Friedland | timeline score: 14 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 20:04 | answer | added | rdm | timeline score: 8 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 20:01 | answer | added | John D. Cook | timeline score: 17 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 17:43 | comment | added | Torsten Schoeneberg | Related question: mathoverflow.net/questions/13896 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 16:53 | answer | added | Uwe Franz | timeline score: 25 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 15:40 | comment | added | Thomas Riepe | @Jonny Evans and arsmath - I only tell what I perceived. As said, I do not think it is worth the effort to try to analyze that, because the interesting issue is IMO a different one. One cause of a dislike of 'star'-mathematicians by the others just comes from the selfperception of the business: If one thinks, mathematics strives for complicated proofs for special statements, one would find work like Grothendieck's very absurd. And as most mathematicians think, 'the difference' between the people comes from IQ + background knowledge, they may be upset if such causes would not show up. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 15:36 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | Regarding wccanard's example of Heegner: There was a gap in Heegner's proof but Harold Stark describes it as "very minor." As I understand it, Birch, Stark, and Deuring all independently came to the conclusion that Heegner's proof was basically correct, and they found different ways of filling the gap. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 15:26 | comment | added | Martin Brandenburg | Another folklore story: Gödel's insights were rejected by some mathematicians who just didn't want to accept that their dreams were faded ... | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 15:13 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 29 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 14:25 | comment | added | arsmath | Grothendieck is as far from a plausible example of this phenomenon as can be imagined. He won the Fields Medal in 1966. I'm sure there were people who didn't like Grothendieck's influence and style of doing mathematics, but the only reason they would care is that he was so influential. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 14:06 | answer | added | Torsten Schoeneberg | timeline score: 38 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 13:50 | comment | added | Jonny Evans | @Thomas Riepe: Surely this disregard was about the value of the work, not its correctness? Or by "nonsense" do you mean "abstract nonsense"? | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 13:38 | answer | added | Abdelmalek Abdesselam | timeline score: 4 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 12:40 | history | edited | user9072 |
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| Feb 12, 2013 at 11:38 | answer | added | Torsten Schoeneberg | timeline score: 12 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 10:52 | answer | added | Andrej Bauer | timeline score: 23 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 10:26 | comment | added | Thomas Riepe | @Jonny Evans - yes, I had met until ca. the late 1990s some very good mathematicians outside the small algebraic geometry circles who expressed their disregards very strongly. Doubtless this was much more intense in e.g. the 1970s. But that should happen regularily if really new ideas come up whose digestion needs work and time, so the interesting question is what makes the mathematics community to come to terms with that in a reasonable way. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 9:39 | comment | added | Jonny Evans | Did anyone ever really think that about Grothendieck? I suspect not. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 9:10 | answer | added | Nilotpal Kanti Sinha | timeline score: 24 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 9:10 | comment | added | Thomas Riepe | Grothendieck's way of doing algebraic geometry was regarded as nonsense by many mathematicians for a long time. I think that repelling new concepts is not that unusual even in mathematics, but that the interesting issue is that mathematics seems to have an unusual tolerance to endure a long time of insecurity if new ideas may really turn useful? | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 8:57 | comment | added | Daniel Moskovich | I strongly feel this question should limit itself to mathematicians who died before, say, 1960. Otherwise it borders on gossip- I can name contemporary mathematicians whose papers were ridiculed but later accepted, but to do so would be entirely gossip. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 8:54 | answer | added | Daniel Moskovich | timeline score: 22 | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 8:19 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Nilotpal Kanti Sinha | ||
| Feb 12, 2013 at 8:16 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | My point about "folklore" is that just because everyone has heard it and repeats it, that doesn't always guarantee it's true -- I'm told this is the case for much of what people claim about Copernicus and Galileo, and I suspect the same goes for the history of mathematics. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 7:56 | comment | added | Michael Zieve | The question says "Ramanujan's work on divergent series was rejected by three leading English mathematicians". Is that true? Or did they just ignore the letters he sent them? | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 7:38 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | Are we making any attempt to distinguish between "folklore" and "history" here? | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 7:32 | comment | added | user30035 | Heegner proved that the well-known list of im quad fields with class number 1 was complete, but his proof was rejected by many in the mathematical community, I believe because the paper was hard to read and Heegner was not a professional mathematician. Birch checked it was OK though, many years later. But this comment is really just to say that within mathematics this sort of thing is far rarer than in other fields. I can think of more artists/musicians who died obscure and/or paupers but whose work was celebrated later. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 7:25 | history | asked | Nilotpal Kanti Sinha | CC BY-SA 3.0 |