"In August 2006, Perelman was offered the Fields Medal for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow", but he declined the award, stating: "I'm not interested in money or fame; I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo." On 22 December 2006, the scientific journal Science recognized Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture as the scientific "Breakthrough of the Year", the first such recognition in the area of mathematics.
On 18 March 2010, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. On 1 July 2010, he turned down the prize of one million dollars, saying that he considered the decision of the board of CMI and the award very unfair and that his contribution to solving the Poincaré conjecture was no greater than that of Richard S. Hamilton, the mathematician who pioneered the Ricci flow with the aim of attacking the conjecture. He also turned down the prestigious prize of the European Mathematical Society.
The Fields Medal and Millennium Prize
In May 2006, a committee of nine mathematicians voted to award Perelman a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture. However, Perelman declined to accept the prize. Sir John Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, approached Perelman in Saint Petersburg in June 2006 to persuade him to accept the prize. After 10 hours of attempted persuasion over two days, Ball gave up. Two weeks later, Perelman summed up the conversation as follows: "He proposed to me three alternatives: accept and come; accept and don't come, and we will send you the medal later; third, I don't accept the prize. From the very beginning, I told him I have chosen the third one ... [the prize] was completely irrelevant for me. Everybody understood that if the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed." "'I'm not interested in money or fame,' he is quoted to have said at the time. 'I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I'm not a hero of mathematics. I'm not even that successful; that is why I don't want to have everybody looking at me.'" Nevertheless, on 22 August 2006, Perelman was publicly offered the medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid "for his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow". He did not attend the ceremony, and declined to accept the medal, making him the only person to decline this prestigious prize.
He had previously turned down a prestigious prize from the European Mathematical Society.
On 18 March 2010, Perelman was awarded a Millennium Prize for solving the problem. On June 8, 2010, he did not attend a ceremony in his honor at the Institut Océanographique, Paris to accept his $1 million prize. According to Interfax, Perelman refused to accept the Millennium prize in July 2010. He considered the decision of the Clay Institute unfair for not sharing the prize with Richard S. Hamilton,and stated that "the main reason is my disagreement with the organized mathematical community. I don't like their decisions, I consider them unjust."
The Clay Institute subsequently used Perelman's prize money to fund the "Poincaré Chair", a temporary position for young promising mathematicians at the Paris Institut Henri Poincaré.Perelman quit his job at the Steklov Institute in December 2005. His friends are said to have stated that he currently finds mathematics a painful topic to discuss; some even say that he has abandoned mathematics entirely.
Perelman is quoted in an article in The New Yorker saying that he is disappointed with the ethical standards of the field of mathematics. The article implies that Perelman refers particularly to the efforts of Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau to downplay Perelman's role in the proof and play up the work of Cao and Zhu. Perelman added, "I can't say I'm outraged. Other people do worse. Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest." He has also said that "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated."
This, combined with the possibility of being awarded a Fields medal, led him to quit professional mathematics. He has said that "As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice. Either to make some ugly thing or, if I didn't do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit." (The New Yorker authors explained Perelman's reference to "some ugly thing" as "a fuss" on Perelman's part about the ethical breaches he perceived).
Perelman and the MediaPerelman has avoided journalists and other members of the media. Masha Gessen, the author of Perfect Rigour: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century, a book about him, was unable to meet him.
Perelman refuses to talk to journalists. One who managed to reach him on his mobile was told: "You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms."- Wikipedia on PerelmanThe last words attributed to Archimedes are "Do not disturb my circles", a reference to the circles in the mathematical drawing that he was supposedly studying when disturbed by the Roman soldier. This quote is often given in Latin as "Noli turbare circulos meos," but there is no reliable evidence that Archimedes uttered these words and they do not appear in the account given by Plutarch. Valerius Maximus, writing in Memorable Doings and Sayings in the 1st century AD, gives the phrase as "...sed protecto manibus puluere 'noli' inquit, 'obsecro, istum disturbare'" - "... but protecting the dust with his hands, said 'I beg of you, do not disturb this.'" The phrase is also given in Katharevousa Greek as "μὴ μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε!" (Mē mou tous kuklous taratte!).- Wikipedia on Archimedes.
Professor Falola,
You're right that most of these people are actually mentally sick. Incidentally, Moses and I have privately discussed this dimension several times in the past. In my November 9, 2010 column for the Daily Trust titled "Intellectual 419: Philip Emeagwali and Gabriel Oyibo Compared," I said this of Oyibo:
"But anyone who has followed Oyibo's life closely will agree that the man needs help—seriously. The brother has lost it. He has no job as I write now. He left the university system as an untenured associate professor years ago. (Hmm.... Can you imagine a four-time Nobel Prize nominee in Physics who no U.S. university or research institution wants to touch with a barge pole?) If you need evidence of Oyibo's undisguised psychic imbalance,read his deleted profile on Wikipedia, which he wrote of himself.
Here is a sample from the profile for your amusement: "Honors and Awards: Professor G. Oyibo has been recognized as being closer to GOD (intellectually and in other ways), than any other human being because of the GAGUT discovery. He has also been recognized by the Nigerian Federal Government as Mathematical Genius which was inscribed on a Nigerian Postage Stamp that was issued in 2005. Professor G. Oyibo has also been recognized as the Greatest Genius and the Most Intelligent Human Being ever created by GOD. He has also been recognized as the Greatest Mathematical Genius of all time. Professor G. Oyibo has been recognized by the Nigerian Senate, representing the entire population of Nigeria of over 200 million people, through a Senate Motion No. 151 page 320 presented in the Federal Republic of Nigeria Order Paper on Tuesday, 15th March, 2005."
Farooq
If the above is not proof of a man who is truly in need of psychiatric help, I don't know what is.
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 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
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 6:30 AM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
--Moses and Farooq:
Allow me to complicate this a little further, and do please respond in a way to push the debate.
Can we not argue that those who behave in making the grandiose claims, if they are true as you both have analyzed, deserve our sympathy: that they are actually sick, somewhat like Trump, and we need to help them. I don't know how to help them. But should we treat them as normal? If you are not based at Oxford, and you deceive yourself and others to the level of giving a Convocation Lecture, is this not a sort of madness?
I once alerted some institutions that a Nigerian guy based in Houston is not a surgeon. He made bogus claims, and was actually capable of giving lectures. It cost me three visitations to him to realize that he failed in medical school, but continued to see himself as a surgeon who won the Nobel Prize! I am sorry to say this in public: he once came to my annual conference in a nice car, announced his wealth and position. Guess what, he took women home, professional women with PhDs. I apologize for saying this, but it has to be said. When I told one of the women that the man was fake, he abused me to high heavens, saying that I am jealous. Well, when she was abandoned in a hotel room as the man fled and she was asked to pay, I did, as this is what Jesus Christ taught me to do in the Book of Matthew.
I do have a former graduate student who goes every day to check his mail box, saying that he is expecting a job from Yale and Princeton. When I asked him if he applied, he said "no". He said they are bound to offer him a job as he is the best historian in the world. He continues to talk like this, and recently in Chicago, he was looking for his name in the list of Herskovits winners.
Are we dealing with fraud or should we approach it from larger serious mental problems?
It is one thing to day dream; it is another thing to have exaggerated ambitions. But to make bogus claims speaks to the state of mental health.
TF
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7222 (fax)
http://groups.google.com/group
/USAAfricaDialogue
From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroup
s.com > on behalf of agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Date: Monday, December 18, 2017 at 5:15 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Remember Enoch Opeyemi Who Claimed to have Solved the Riemann Hypothesis?
Let us remember that it is not only the Nigerian media that is gullible on these claim a section of the international media (the BBC) is too. So let us not essentialise Nigerian gullibility.
Forget about the Yale doctoral student as Opeyemi would want us to, what is the position of the Nigerian academic mathemical community on all of these?
I think this is where the emphasis should lie. Claims are being made tangentially in their name by someone supposedly one of their own. As far as they are concerned do the claims hold? It is not the members of a listserve that should riddle the claims with holes.Two years is sufficient for them to do their job thoroughly. They should take the lead.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Ibukunolu A Babajide <ibk2005@gmail.com>
Date: 18/12/2017 10:39 (GMT+00:00)
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroup
s.com >Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Remember Enoch Opeyemi Who Claimed to have Solved the Riemann Hypothesis?
Farooq,
You have unearthed the anti-intellectualism that has garrotted the throat of the Nigerian intellectual space. It is all signs and wonders and miracles without exertion. I am glad you have refreshed our collective memory of the father of the Internet fraud by Phillip Emegwali and the GO Adeboye claim that he drove his jeep for 200miles without fuel. A few like Abalaka also rode on the HIV-AIDS lie bandwagon.
My consternation is how gullible the Nigerian public space can be with people defending these charlatans and their incredulous statements with all the energy and life in them. How can we develop as a country when our minds are slothfully reliant on miracles signs and wonders and we are too lazy to think straight. That is why every Ponzi scheme and get rich quick snake oil scams take root easily and destroy Nigerians. The reason is that we are intellectually lazy and we always want miracles to inure to our benefit.
I only this morning asked a zealot friend of mine where it is written that we must tithe and he informed me that he does not need the scriptures to inform him anymore because the holy spirit puts the truth on his heart. Pure hogwash! When they are pinned to the wall they resort to magical spiritism.
I know you and I has departed ways on your attempt to be the gate-keeper of English language and grammar and your unabashed pro-Atiku political grandstanding in the past but on this one where you expose intellectual 419ers, I am solidly behing you like the hump of the camel. More grease to your elbows as you expose more liars and charlatans!
Cheers.
IBK
On 16 December 2017 at 21:26, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:
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 Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science Building
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperog
Author 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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