Timeline for Where can I find Rademacher's wrong disproof of the Riemann Hypothesis?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 17, 2018 at 17:31 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | @CarloBeenakker Thank you very much. I guess that should suffice for now, although I have to wonder if something got garbled in someone's transmission. | |
| Nov 17, 2018 at 16:31 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | Hi @ToddTrimble --- I am relying on the April 30, 1945 Time Magazine as the authoritative source (in the absence of other contemporary sources); it says "A wire from the society's secretary, University of Pennsylvania Professor John R. Kline, asked Editor Albert to stop the presses: a paper disproving the Riemann hypothesis was on the way. Its author: Professor Hans Adolf Rademacher, a refugee German mathematician now at Penn." | |
| Nov 17, 2018 at 14:37 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | @CarloBeenakker I am sorry to belabor this point, but I don't understand why you are calling it a disproof. Maybe you are using the word differently from how I'm using it. "... if you assume the Riemann Hypothesis is false [my emphasis], and then do this, this, and this, and you get a contradiction, then it must be true." So based on that, the conclusion would have been RH is true. In other words, based on the description that you quoted, it sounds as if Rademacher was trying to prove RH is true, via a proof by contradiction. Not a disproof by contradiction. | |
| Nov 17, 2018 at 4:40 | review | Close votes | |||
| Nov 17, 2018 at 13:27 | |||||
| Nov 16, 2018 at 14:59 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | it was a disproof; I have collected the available info in the answer box. | |
| Nov 16, 2018 at 14:58 | answer | added | Carlo Beenakker | timeline score: 10 | |
| Nov 16, 2018 at 14:33 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | @CarloBeenakker Thanks! So apparently, reading that description, it was a wrong proof (by contradiction), not a wrong disproof as in the post above, i.e., Rademacher was attempting to prove RH true, not false. | |
| Nov 15, 2018 at 21:12 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | it's in the book linked to in the first comment; I copied the page, you can find it here | |
| Nov 15, 2018 at 21:05 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | @CarloBeenakker Thank you. The Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything about the Rademacher story; do you know of a place in print where the error is discussed? | |
| Nov 15, 2018 at 20:49 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | @ToddTrimble -- Rademacher's error was noticed by Carl Siegel | |
| Nov 15, 2018 at 14:30 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | "... they say Rademacher's error": can you tell us who "they" are? (Maybe @CarloBeenakker has some idea?) If that information is correct, then Rademacher's embarrassment over such a rookie mistake becomes very understandable. | |
| Feb 21, 2018 at 16:50 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | Another quote: Rademacher was terribly embarrased by the ordeal and never spoke of it again. [...] It was well known that no one was to mention the words "Riemann hypothesis" in his presence. So I would imagine any copies of this withdrawn manuscript would have been well hidden, the AMS perhaps still has a copy in their files... | |
| Feb 21, 2018 at 16:27 | comment | added | TKZim. | @ Carlo Beenacker, so after the manuscript was withdrawn by its author, it couldn't be found anywhere ? | |
| Feb 21, 2018 at 16:19 | history | edited | TKZim. | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 4 characters in body
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| Feb 21, 2018 at 16:18 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | The manuscript was submitted in 1943 to the American Mathematical Society’s Transactions, but withdrawn by Rademacher before publication. Here is the story (page 109) | |
| Feb 21, 2018 at 16:12 | history | edited | Peter Heinig | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Small grammatical corrections. Added relevant tag. Style and content preserved,
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| Feb 21, 2018 at 16:09 | review | First posts | |||
| Feb 21, 2018 at 16:31 | |||||
| Feb 21, 2018 at 16:08 | history | asked | TKZim. | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
