Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] James McCanney and the prime numbers

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 1 May 2008, Jonathan King wrote:

> > http://www.calculateprimes.com/BookDVDOrderSubPage.HTM
>
> In any case, this story has been out at least a year without any 
> positive reaction whatever, so I think it's safe to say that it's 
> plonkable.


There hasn't been a negative reaction either.  I guess bad ideas get a 
negative reaction, but psychotic ideas are just ignored.

One of our senior biostat faculty has a PhD in math.  He told me that many 
of the cranks on the 'net spend their time attacking Einstein and Cantor. 
They claim to have proofs that these famous guys were wrong in some way. 
The professor wasn't sure why they pick on Cantor so much.  I don't know 
either but maybe it has something to do with Cantor's Jewish ancestry 
(which might not be as well known as his use of the Hebrew aleph for 
cardinal numbers).  Sometimes paranoid people are both grandiose have very 
strong racist or anti-semitic streaks.

By the way, this is a really interesting article about math cranks:

http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/abnormal/1999/msg00145.html

After reading a little more about Cantor, I think there are many reasons 
why crazy people would attack him.  Just look at the second paragraph 
here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor

Mike

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