In response to one of the very earliest Dibs! posts — a review of Dan Rockmore’s Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis — Dibs! has recently received an astonishing email from Jiang Chun-Xuan, a mathematician in China who claims to have disproved the legendarily difficult problem. Jiang included in his email a detailed mathematical paper (which you can view online in pdf form here) which purports to conclusively demonstrate that Riemann’s hypothesis is in fact false. Why did Jiang bother to notify a lowly literary blog of his epochal discovery? Therein lies a tale — and here the story starts to get even more mystifying. (If you’re wondering what the Reimann Hypothesis even is, click on the review of the Rockmore book above for an explanation.)
For if the Reimann Hypothesis is in fact proven to be false, the entire field of mathematics would be shaken to its core. So one would imagine that such a discovery would be greeted with great fanfare (or great alarm, depending on which side you’re rooting for). Yet instead, Jiang’s paper met with an echoing silence from the mainstream mathematical community. As a result, he took it upon himself to send out his proof to anyone anywhere who might conceivably be interested — including, oddly, Dibs!.
To the untrained eye, Jiang’s proof seems mighty impressive, filled with incomprehensible equations and confident proclamations. Why then has it been roundly ignored by the gatekeepers of mathematical knowledge? Since the average person does not have the background to judge the quality of Jiang’s work, we must rely on the experts to tell us if he really has succeeded in smashing one of the pillars of modern mathematics. And what do the experts have to say? Zilch. They don’t even answer the doorbell.
One possible explanation for this is that Jiang is so wrong that his “disproof” doesn’t even need debunking. The only clue to this possibility is a discussion at Wikipedia about the Reimann Hypothesis in which a commenter named Winfried Aschauer vigorously dismisses Jiang’s paper as “very strange” and “rubbish,” and that any minutes spent reading the paper was “wasted time.”
But aside from this one naysayer of unknown authority, one cannot find any mathematician or publication online willing to discuss the merits of Jiang’s claim. In frustration, he has allowed the fringe-y “Institute for Basic Research” — an outside-the-mainstream science organization in Florida — to publish his paper, since no one else would.
International biases also come into play, as Jiang is only one of many Chinese scientists over the last few decades who feel their work has been shunned by the West; though there has been some acknowledgement of Chinese discoveries in the last few years, many Chinese scientists must feel as if they are operating in a parallel universe. Could Jiang be ignored by the Western mathematical establishment simply because he is Chinese?
The story ends here, in limbo. We — the unwashed masses — don’t know if the Reimann Hypothesis has been disproven, or instead if an eccentric professor in China is suffering from delusions of grandeur. And if this accursed silence continues much longer, we may never know.