Timeline for What are some famous rejections of correct mathematics?
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| Apr 22, 2023 at 17:48 | comment | added | Hollis Williams | Are you sure you aren't conflating several people here? It was Clifford who first made a vague suggestion that gravitation might be the manifestation of some underlying geometry, I don't remember Riemann ever saying anything like this in writing. | |
| Feb 4, 2010 at 15:40 | comment | added | Ryan Budney | It sounds like he wasn't ignored or rejected. He had a lot of nice ideas, some of which just didn't have a natural place in physics yet. The success of an idea has a lot to do with whether or not the ambient culture is ready to hear it -- in this case it took Lorentz's work, the Michelson-Morley experiment and Maxwell's equations to "set the stage", I suppose in the opposite order to which I wrote them. :) | |
| Feb 4, 2010 at 10:56 | comment | added | Lasse Rempe | Isn't this - particularly the first - more a case of things being "ignored" rather than "rejected"? Another famous example in this vein would be Poincare's discovery of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (or "chaos" in popular lingo) in the n-body problem. It took until the mid-20th century for the fundamental importance of these phenomena to be recognized, but that does not mean that his result was rejected. | |
| Feb 4, 2010 at 3:50 | history | edited | Alex R. | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Feb 4, 2010 at 3:43 | history | answered | Alex R. | CC BY-SA 2.5 |