To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 14:29:48 -0400
Subject: [WSFA] Goldbach's Conjecture
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

On Wed, 19 Jun 2002 07:26:31 -0500 "Eric Jablow" <erjablow at netacc.net>
writes:

> In fact, I just looked at the paper--it has the whiff of crank-hood.
>  I'm
> not
> going to get my hopes up.  When I was a grad student, I had to deal
> with
> at least one crank Fermat-solver.  It was unpleasant.
>

There is some garbled grammar on page 2, which is not a good sign, and
it's surprising considering that page 1 reads smoothly.  Perhaps
Javaherdashti is not a fluent speaker of English and had someone else
edit the paper, and the editor couldn't understand what was intended to
be said on page 2, and so just left it garbled.

The paper seems not to have been published in a peer-reviewed journal,
but rather just posted on the UC Davis math website.  Perhaps the author
is hoping for some feedback before submitting it to a journal.  The email
address is on page 1.

If mathematicians have been working on this without success since 1742,
it seems unlikely that a valid proof would be compact enough to fit on 11
pages.  Mathematicians have presumably also been working since 1742 to
disprove the conjecture, including using fast computers to look for an
arithmetic counterexample.

Ron Kean

.

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