Linked Questions

137 votes
26 answers
29k views

What are some famous rejections of correct mathematics?

Dick Lipton has a blog post that motivated this question. He recalled the Stark-Heegner Theorem: There are only a finite number of imaginary quadratic fields that have unique factorization. They are $...
212 votes
14 answers
60k views

Why doesn't mathematics collapse even though humans quite often make mistakes in their proofs?

To begin with, I am aware of these questions, which seems to be related: How do I fix someone's published error?, Examples of common false beliefs in mathematics, When have we lost a body of ...
65 votes
5 answers
58k views

Global character of ABC/Szpiro inequalities

In [M24] it is asserted that "considering $abc$ triples of the form $(1,p^n,1+p^n)$ for a prime number $p$ and an arbitrarily large positive integer $n$, one can verify that ABC/Szpiro ...
Jon23's user avatar
  • 1,139
105 votes
5 answers
16k views

Independent evidence for the classification of topological 4-manifolds?

Is there any evidence for the classification of topological 4-manifolds, aside from Freedman's 1982 paper "The topology of four-dimensional manifolds", Journal of Differential Geometry 17(3) 357–453? ...
Brendan Guilfoyle's user avatar
35 votes
9 answers
14k views

What is... a grossone?

Y. Sergeyev developed a positional system for representing infinite numbers using a basic unit called a "grossone", as well as what he calls an "infinity computer". The ...
Mikhail Katz's user avatar
  • 16.6k
106 votes
4 answers
13k views

What is the mistake in the proof of the Homotopy hypothesis by Kapranov and Voevodsky?

In 1991, Kapranov and Voevodsky published a proof of a now famously false result, roughly saying that the homotopy category of spaces is equivalent to the homotopy category of strict infinity ...
Simon Henry's user avatar
  • 42.4k
65 votes
7 answers
14k views

Is Thompson's Group F amenable?

Last year a paper on the arXiv (Akhmedov) claimed that Thompson's group $F$ is not amenable, while another paper, published in the journal "Infinite dimensional analysis, quantum probability, and ...
ADL's user avatar
  • 2,821
53 votes
7 answers
10k views

Are there any fields of academic mathematics whose epistemic status as math is controversial within the academic community?

String theory (and related areas of purely theoretical quantum gravity, like loop quantum gravity) has a unique position within the academic physics community. Many academic physicists don't really ...
68 votes
3 answers
10k views

Replication crisis in mathematics

Lately, I have been learning about the replication crisis, see How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth (good YouTube video) — by Michael Shermer and Stuart Ritchie. ...
12 votes
7 answers
3k views

Books containing new results

In Endless controversy about the correctness of significant papers, Denis Serre writes: The research community is able to point out incorrect statements, at least among those which have some ...
49 votes
2 answers
5k views

Well known theorems that have not been proved

I believe that there are numerous challenging theorems in mathematics for which only a sketch of a proof exists. To meet the standards of rigor, a complete proof of these theorems has yet to be ...