Wednesday, April 05, 2017

A retiree solves a mathematical problem from 1972

 A retiree discovers an elusive proof- and nobody notices
"AS HE WAS brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory, and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades.....
Proofs of obscure provenance are sometimes overlooked at first, but usually not for long: A major paper like Royen’s would normally get submitted and published somewhere like the Annals of Statistics, experts said, and then everybody would hear about it. But Royen, not having a career to advance, chose to skip the slow and often demanding peer-review process typical of top journals. He opted instead for quick publication in the Far East Journal of Theoretical Statistics, a periodical based in Allahabad, India, that was largely unknown to experts and which, on its website, rather suspiciously listed Royen as an editor. (He had agreed to join the editorial board the year before.)
With this red flag emblazoned on it, the proof continued to be ignored. Finally, in December 2015, the Polish mathematician Rafał Latała and his student Dariusz Matlak put out a paper advertising Royen’s proof, reorganizing it in a way some people found easier to follow. Word is now getting around. Tilmann Gneiting, a statistician at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, just 65 miles from Bingen, said he was shocked to learn in July 2016, two years after the fact, that the GCI had been proved. The statistician Alan Izenman, of Temple University in Philadelphia, still hadn’t heard about the proof when asked for comment last month."

1 comment:

NVR said...

That is great news and also a good story to tell. Also there is still hope for you. Good luck.