Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Remember Enoch Opeyemi Who Claimed to have Solved the Riemann Hypothesis?

Trial and error make up the process of scientific discovery. Do not confuse the fraud of a professor wannabe with the efforts of scholars to solve insoluble problems. Even if a mathematician fails to solve an ancient problem, it does not follow that the attempt was fradulent. Do you know how many light balls Edison tried before the thousands of researchers in his lab stumbled on the lasting filament? We should commend those who tried even if they invented nothing. Our problem is that not enough of us are formulating and testing hypotheses and not enough funding is available to support pure research.

Biko
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On Sat, 16/12/17, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Remember Enoch Opeyemi Who Claimed to have Solved the Riemann Hypothesis?
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Saturday, 16 December, 2017, 13:26

Remember
Enoch Opeyemi Who Claimed to have Solved the Riemann
Hypothesis?

By
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Twitter:@farooqkperogi
Two years ago, a certain Dr. Enoch
Opeyemi who teaches mathematics at the Federal University in
Oye-Ekiti suckered the Nigerian and British media into
believing that he had solved the 156-year-old Riemann
Hypothesis and would earn the $1 million prize for this
"feat" from the US-based Clay Mathematics
Institute.
In my November 21, 2015 column titled, "'Mathematical'
Enoch Opeyemi and the Making of Another Nigerian
Intellectual 419er," I pointed out that Opeyemi's
claims didn't stand up to scrutiny. "The moment I read
about Dr. Enoch Opeyemi's claim to have solved the
156-year-old Riemann Hypothesis in the Vanguard of November
15, 2015, I didn't need to read a second opinion to know
it was suspect at best and fraudulent at worst," I
wrote.
Certain credulous Nigerians attacked me
for this. The more reasonable ones among them said since the
Clay Mathematics Institute said it would reward any claim to
have solved the hypothesis only if such a claim is published
in a reputable mathematical journal and remains unchallenged
in the mathematical scholarly community for two years, I
should wait two years before pronouncing Opeyemi a
delusional scammer.
Well, I have waited two years. I checked
the website of the Clay Mathematics Institute, and the
Riemann Hypothesis that Opeyemi claimed to have solved two
years ago is still listed as
"unsolved." So, clearly, Opeyemi fooled the
Nigerian and British media who in turn fooled the world.
Some of us who saw through the chicanery and pointed it out
were called cynical, negative, hypercritical, and even
accused of being jealous of a high-achieving Nigerian
scholar.
When Opeyemi's claims invited a
critical mass of scrutiny from sundry scholars and
commentators, he chose to grant
a TV interview to a popular Nigerian pastor by the name
of Sunday Adelaja. During the interview, Opeyemi made even
more ridiculous claims that, frankly, call his very sanity
into question.
A Yale University PhD student in
mathematics, for instance, was particularly clinical in
tearing Opeyemi's claims to shreds. In his attempt to
undermine the Yale University PhD student during the TV
interview, Opeyemi said PhD students don't publish in
scholarly outlets until they have defended their doctoral
dissertations, and that his challenger wasn't worthy of
any attention.
It takes unusual ignorance for a person
who supposedly has a PhD to make that kind of outrageously
fallacious claim. In many PhD programs in the US students
are not allowed to graduate until they have published in
well-regarded academic journals. This is especially true of
the hard sciences.
It also turned out that Opeyemi
plagiarized a paper on the Riemann Hypothesis and uploaded
it onto his academia.edu page. (It
isn't clear if it was the plagiarized paper he presented
as his "solution" to the Riemann Hypothesis). When
Adelaja asked him about this, his defense was that the
plagiarized paper on his academia.edu page was
uploaded by someone who hacked into his account! But the
plagiarized paper had been on his academia.edu
page months before he attracted attention to himself through
his false, ridiculous claims.
I am dredging up this issue for two
related reasons. One, we tend to be amnesic, and because
we're amnesic we continually fall victim to the same cheap
scam tactics. To rejig the memories of people who forgot
about this issue, here is an abridged version of my
November 21, 2015 column:
Now, Opeyemi's only evidence for
claiming to have solved the Riemann Hypothesis was that he
presented a paper on the puzzle at the International
Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science in Vienna,
Austria.
Well, it has turned out that the
conference itself may be a borderline scam operation. An
August 20, 2011 blog post titled "Fake Paper Accepted by
Nina Ringo's Vienna Conference" revealed that a
scientist by the name of Mohammad Homayoun who was
suspicious of the genuineness of the International
Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science (ICMC)
decided to test his suspicion by submitting a fake,
worthless, nonsensical paper to the conference to see if it
would be accepted or rejected.
The researcher's hunch was accurate:
the ICMC in Vienna appears to be an elaborate, money-making
scholarly scam. His paper was accepted even though it was
intentionally nonsensical. "The conference claims that
submissions/papers are reviewed/refereed BUT they are
not," the researcher wrote. "A fake paper was submitted
for evaluation to intercomp2011@gmail.com
on Sun, Jan 2, 2011. The notification of acceptance was
received on Sun, Jan 9, 2011." That's just one week of
"peer review."
But even if the conference were genuine,
and it could very well be, you can't prove something as
momentous as a 156-year-old mathematical problem with a mere
conference presentation. In the rituals of knowledge
production in academe, for any claim to be taken seriously,
it has to be published in a well-regarded, peer-reviewed
outlet, such as a journal. This is elementary
knowledge…
 My sense is that Dr. Opeyemi genuinely
fancies himself as having solved this mathematical puzzle,
and his self-construal of his intellectual machismo got a
boost when his paper got accepted for presentation at a
conference in Vienna, Austria. In the now rampant xenophilic
academic culture in Nigeria that uncritically valorizes the
foreign, for one's paper to be accepted at an
"international" (read: white) academic conference
is seen as an endorsement of one's peerless scholarly
prowess. 
Never mind that many of these
"international" conferences and journals are actually
fraudulent.When naive xenophilia seamlessly
commingles with the kind of mortifyingly cringe-worthy
credulity that pervades the Nigerian media landscape AND the
progressive dearth and death of basic fact-checking in even
international media outlets like the BBC, you end up with
embarrassing stories like this.
This is not the first time this has
happened. In July 2011, another Nigerian academic by the
name of Michael Atovigba claimed to have solved the same
Riemann Hypothesis. The ever so gullible Nigerian media
believed and celebrated him. The reason Atovigba convinced
himself that he had solved the mathematical puzzle that
Opeyemi now also claims to have solved was that his paper
(which has only seven references, four of which are from
Wikipedia!) was found "worthy" of publication in an
"international" journal, which turned out to be a
notoriously worthless, predatory, bait-and-switch
Pakistan-based journal that masquerades as a UK
journal….
Atovigba told the (Nigerian) Guardian
that he would get his $1 million reward from the Clay
Mathematics Institute now that he had published his
"proof" in a "reputable international journal." Four
years after, another deluded Nigerian "scientist" claims
to have proved the same hypothesis for which Atovigba is
still expecting his $1 million, and the media's legendary
amnesia ensures that these clowns continue to expose Nigeria
and Nigerians to international ridicule.
Incredible!
What is even more incredible is that a
Nigerian BBC correspondent's story on Opeyemi, inspired by
Vanguard's initial reporting (which was itself instigated
by Opeyemi himself), has caused the British media to
perpetrate Opeyemi's misrepresentation. Now, the British
media's uncritical echoing of Opeyemi's initial lie is
invoked as evidence to lend credibility to his claims to a
non-existent feat. It has become one labyrinthine network of
tortuous, self-reinforcing falsehoods. Only Philip
Emeagwali's carefully packaged fraud outrivals
this.  
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging
Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science
Building Room 5092 MD
2207402 Bartow
Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA
30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms
of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism
is that you are constantly being either proven right or
pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will





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