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Kevin Long
Kevin Long
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This isn't a topic I'm familiar with, just something I've read on Quanta, but according to this article, Richard Kershner of Johns Hopkins claimed to have a complete classification of convex pentagon tilings in 1968, though he notably saysaid that "The proof that the list in Theorems 1 and 2 is complete is extremely laborious and will be given elsewhere" and that "a complete proof would require a rather large book".

However, after Martin Gardner talked about this claim in his column in Scientific American in 1975, it got to Marjorie Rice, a California housewife with a high school math education, who found four additional families, and Richard James, a computer programmer, who found another. Eventually, Michael Rao proved that there were exactly 15. You can read more about Rice in this article by the same author.

Admittedly, this is an instance of a single professional mathematician making a false claim without giving a proof, which mathematicians consider poor form, and a nonprofessional correcting him, rather than the general mathematics community being wrong.

This isn't a topic I'm familiar with, just something I've read on Quanta, but according to this article, Richard Kershner of Johns Hopkins claimed to have a complete classification of convex pentagon tilings in 1968, though he notably say that "The proof that the list in Theorems 1 and 2 is complete is extremely laborious and will be given elsewhere" and that "a complete proof would require a rather large book".

However, after Martin Gardner talked about this claim in his column in Scientific American in 1975, it got to Marjorie Rice, a California housewife with a high school math education, who found four additional families, and Richard James, a computer programmer, who found another. Eventually, Michael Rao proved that there were exactly 15. You can read more about Rice in this article by the same author.

Admittedly, this is an instance of a single professional mathematician making a false claim without giving a proof, which mathematicians consider poor form, and a nonprofessional correcting him, rather than the general mathematics community being wrong.

This isn't a topic I'm familiar with, just something I've read on Quanta, but according to this article, Richard Kershner of Johns Hopkins claimed to have a complete classification of convex pentagon tilings in 1968, though he notably said that "The proof that the list in Theorems 1 and 2 is complete is extremely laborious and will be given elsewhere" and that "a complete proof would require a rather large book".

However, after Martin Gardner talked about this claim in his column in Scientific American in 1975, it got to Marjorie Rice, a California housewife with a high school math education, who found four additional families, and Richard James, a computer programmer, who found another. Eventually, Michael Rao proved that there were exactly 15. You can read more about Rice in this article by the same author.

Admittedly, this is an instance of a single professional mathematician making a false claim without giving a proof, which mathematicians consider poor form, and a nonprofessional correcting him, rather than the general mathematics community being wrong.

Source Link
Kevin Long
Kevin Long
  • 603
  • 4
  • 7

This isn't a topic I'm familiar with, just something I've read on Quanta, but according to this article, Richard Kershner of Johns Hopkins claimed to have a complete classification of convex pentagon tilings in 1968, though he notably say that "The proof that the list in Theorems 1 and 2 is complete is extremely laborious and will be given elsewhere" and that "a complete proof would require a rather large book".

However, after Martin Gardner talked about this claim in his column in Scientific American in 1975, it got to Marjorie Rice, a California housewife with a high school math education, who found four additional families, and Richard James, a computer programmer, who found another. Eventually, Michael Rao proved that there were exactly 15. You can read more about Rice in this article by the same author.

Admittedly, this is an instance of a single professional mathematician making a false claim without giving a proof, which mathematicians consider poor form, and a nonprofessional correcting him, rather than the general mathematics community being wrong.