Timeline for Examples of conjectures that were widely believed to be true but later proved false
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
42 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 8 at 9:51 | answer | added | Gro-Tsen | timeline score: 4 | |
| Dec 26, 2022 at 9:20 | answer | added | vidyarthi | timeline score: 5 | |
| Dec 26, 2022 at 9:13 | answer | added | vidyarthi | timeline score: 7 | |
| Oct 24, 2022 at 20:58 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 5 | |
| Nov 6, 2020 at 12:09 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | Now the same question has been asked on m.se, math.stackexchange.com/questions/3896170/… | |
| Nov 6, 2020 at 11:12 | answer | added | Amir Asghari | timeline score: 4 | |
| Aug 17, 2019 at 7:06 | comment | added | YCor | Many questions, referred as conjecture, are/were not "widely believed to be true". They can be called conjecture because some given mathematician conjectured it. Or even because some mathematician X asked it, and later some other inaccurately referred to it as X's conjecture. Examples of the latter are "von Neumann conjecture" in group theory and "Borel conjecture" on the topology of manifolds. Another example was a 1982 paper in Annals called "A counterexample to a conjecture of Serre, for which the editors later had to write an apology (since Serre never conjectured the denied result). | |
| Aug 16, 2019 at 19:43 | answer | added | Joe Silverman | timeline score: 10 | |
| Aug 16, 2019 at 12:48 | answer | added | Marc Chamberland | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jul 27, 2018 at 20:57 | answer | added | Kevin P. Costello | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jul 27, 2018 at 19:46 | answer | added | Sam Hopkins | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jul 27, 2018 at 15:46 | answer | added | dhy | timeline score: 13 | |
| Apr 4, 2018 at 14:48 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | My experience is different from yours: counterexamples are not less frequent than proved conjectures. | |
| Apr 4, 2018 at 13:02 | answer | added | Sylvain JULIEN | timeline score: 7 | |
| Apr 4, 2018 at 7:51 | answer | added | Daniel Moskovich | timeline score: 19 | |
| May 21, 2015 at 21:18 | answer | added | Anurag | timeline score: 26 | |
| Sep 4, 2012 at 22:02 | answer | added | Abhishek Gupta | timeline score: 12 | |
| Jul 23, 2012 at 17:59 | answer | added | Trevor Wilson | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jul 3, 2012 at 23:44 | comment | added | Joël | Let me reformulate my critic to most answers of this question. An answer should not only point to a conjecture now proved false, but also provide evidence that it used to be "widely believed". | |
| Jul 3, 2012 at 7:55 | comment | added | C.S. | Hardy believed that there couldn't be an elementary proof of the Prime Number Theorem, and after several years Selberg and Erdos proved him wrong. Does that serve as an answer here. | |
| Jul 3, 2012 at 7:43 | answer | added | C.S. | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jul 3, 2012 at 7:06 | answer | added | Abhishek Gupta | timeline score: 7 | |
| Jul 3, 2012 at 1:18 | answer | added | Terry Tao | timeline score: 26 | |
| Jul 3, 2012 at 1:06 | answer | added | kiskis | timeline score: 55 | |
| Jul 2, 2012 at 14:10 | comment | added | user9072 | For the morphing process maybe Hodge's conjecture can serve as an example. But, for something famous but not very old were the original belives apparently were wrong one could consider Carelson's therorem. People including him did believe in counterexamples to the claim he then proved true. See his interview in the Feb 2007 Notices AMS. Or for old things, I think (but I am not a math historian) at some point in time (though perhaps not up to the moement were refuted) people were quite convinced one would be able to solve the quintic with radicals, or 'prove' the parallel postulate. | |
| Jul 2, 2012 at 13:47 | comment | added | user9072 | @Joël: personally I'd assume that if something was widely believed decades or centruies ago yet was proved wrong, then the fact/knowledge that something else was widely believe before gets lost over time. (Personally, I am simply unable to judge how widely believed the Hauptvermutung was.) In addition there is the phenomenon that if something turns out to be just slightly wrong then this is somewhat swept under the carpet. Over time the orginal conjectures and believes get morphed into something that then is actually true, while the original in fact was false. To name something specific: | |
| Jul 2, 2012 at 11:31 | answer | added | juan | timeline score: 29 | |
| Jul 2, 2012 at 1:06 | answer | added | Claudio Gorodski | timeline score: 25 | |
| Jun 29, 2012 at 21:48 | comment | added | Joël | Obviously the relative weakness of the examples below (after two months) show that the PO's impression was not a misconception. Except perhaps the example of Hilbert's program, non of the example given above strikes me as a real "widely believed conjecture", as say the Riemann Hypothesis, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer, the Serre's conjecture or Fontaine-Mazur in the theory of modular forms, the Poincare's conjecture, etc. | |
| Jun 29, 2012 at 17:48 | answer | added | user24527 | timeline score: 3 | |
| May 4, 2012 at 15:48 | answer | added | Noah Schweber | timeline score: 9 | |
| May 4, 2012 at 12:10 | answer | added | Aaron Tikuisis | timeline score: 40 | |
| May 4, 2012 at 5:56 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by S. Carnahan♦ | ||
| May 3, 2012 at 23:27 | answer | added | Salvatore Siciliano | timeline score: 11 | |
| May 3, 2012 at 21:42 | answer | added | Yoav Kallus | timeline score: 17 | |
| May 3, 2012 at 20:56 | answer | added | Georges Elencwajg | timeline score: 80 | |
| May 3, 2012 at 15:21 | comment | added | KConrad | If you read through the answers on the page mathoverflow.net/questions/35468/… you will see that there are notable examples of theorems with initially accepted proofs that were wrong, and in some cases the theorems themselves were really incorrect (not just the proof was wrong). | |
| May 3, 2012 at 15:20 | answer | added | Barry Cipra | timeline score: 0 | |
| May 3, 2012 at 15:09 | answer | added | Michael Renardy | timeline score: 7 | |
| May 3, 2012 at 15:01 | answer | added | Gerald Edgar | timeline score: 30 | |
| May 3, 2012 at 15:00 | comment | added | user9072 | This is a misconception, IMO. | |
| May 3, 2012 at 14:17 | history | asked | Eric | CC BY-SA 3.0 |