Genius or Gibberish? The Strange World of the Math Crank
by George Johnson
The letter, dated Christmas Day 1998 and addressed to a professor
at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, began portentously:
"Nowadays, we seek to comprehend our comprehensions and call that
comprehensiveness knowledge in the mistaken belief that as a science
it is immortal. Such omniscience diffuses like Helium-3 into the
penetralia mentis of omnipotent impotency within any God-head such
that any caveat actor is saved."
Within a few sentences, the writer was holding forth on Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle and "the concept of nothing" as the empty set,
before launching into speculations involving number theory: "It's
enough to make me conjecture that infinity's prime and Riemann's Zeta
function accounts for fractional charge subatomically just for the
Higg's boson with an involucral matrix of ogdoad parity as midwife!"
The letter was typed single-spaced with the tiniest of margins and
embellished with hand-drawn diagrams and colored annotations. Copies
were sent to a list that included the linguist Noam Chomsky, the
physicists John Archibald Wheeler, David Deutsch and Stephen Hawking,
and the mathematician John Casti.
"It has all the hallmarks of a crank," said Dr. Casti, who is
affiliated with the Technical University of Vienna and the Santa Fe
Institute in New Mexico. "It's amazing all the stuff you can get onto
a single piece of paper."
But was it not just possible that couched in the obscure mix of
mathematics, physics and Egyptian mysticism ("ogdoad parity" refers to
four pairs of gods with names like Darkness, Absence and Endlessness),
there lay an important insight?
Didn't two Cambridge University mathematicians dismiss the great
self-taught Indian number theorist Srinvasa Ramanujan as a crackpot
when he sent them long eccentric letters from India early in this
century? Only their colleague G. H. Hardy had the foresight to
recognize Ramanujan as a genius. And didn't the great German
mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss foolishly throw away unread a
groundbreaking paper from his young Norwegian colleague Niels Heinrik
Abel, calling it "another of those monstrosities"?
Physicists get their share of mail from amateurs attempting to
reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity or to show that
Einstein was wrong.
"You can't just say Ramanujan was a genius and these other guys
were cranks," Dr. Hersh said. "With a superficial look, there is
hardly any visible difference. There is not always a sharp line
between eccentric mathematicians and intelligent but maybe obsessed
amateurs."
Until recently much of the mail contained supposed proofs of
Fermat's Last Theorem. But since Dr. Andrew Wiles of Princeton
University recently proved this famous puzzle and number theory, Dr.
Paulos said, the focus has shifted to disproving Dr. Wiles. Another
favorite diversion is Goldbach's Conjecture, which holds that all
even numbers are the sum of two primes. Though no one has found a
counter example, this would-be theorem remains unproven, unless the
solution has been crumpled up in a math department wastebasket
somewhere.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times (February 9, 1999)
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