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

More cautionary tales for those who are proposing the jailing of scientists (not to be confused with a con artist who claims to be a professor just to get dates); to those who believe that a brother like Emeagwali should be locked up in a mental hospital simply because he has not yet won a Nobel Prize after winning the Bell Prize; please read the following and learn from the failures of geniuses:

https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/OnFailingG.html

Biko
--------------------------------------------
On Mon, 18/12/17, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Remember Enoch Opeyemi Who Claimed to have Solved the Riemann Hypothesis?
To: "usaafricadialogue" <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, 18 December, 2017, 19:15

Strange But Mostly True, Stories
Sad, Stories Funny
in addition to Falola's
tragically funny accounts and Farooq's observations,
these accounts below might be added-

I'm not arguing anything on
either side of the debate, I am not suggesting these now
vindicated odd cases are identical with those Farooq
outlines, just observing the strangeness
that sometimes occurs around the highest mathematical
achievements.  All links except one are to Wikipedia
articles, which provide rich references to substantiate 
claims made by the articles.


      Albert
Einstein

What work was Einstein doing when
he wrote his 3 annus mirablis -miracle year-papers in his
20s in 1905? He was working in a patent office in
Switzerland. Can you imagine it- his 3 greatest papers, for
which he got the Nobel,  papers which included his
transformational work on special relativity and
matter/energy equivalence, before the one on general
relativity that came eight years later, if I have the
timeline right,  3 papers that fundamentally changed
physics constructed while he was obscurely analyzing patent
applications, and even being passed over for promotion in
that job, having failed to get an academic job in 'two
frustrating years' of searching, according to the
Wikipedia essay on him.
Charles
Sanders Pierce
Charles Sanders Pierce, described
as the greatest US philosopher and a
landmark mathematician, could get no academic job for much
of his career
and struggled with poverty.
'In 1887 Peirce spent part of
his inheritance from his parents to buy 2,000 acres
(8 km2) of rural land near Milford,
Pennsylvania, which never yielded an economic return. There
he had an 1854 farmhouse remodeled to his design. The
Peirces named the property "Arisbe". There they
lived with few interruptions for the rest of their lives,
Charles writing prolifically, much of it unpublished to this
day . Living beyond their means soon led to grave financial
and legal difficulties.He spent much of his last two decades
unable to afford heat in winter
and subsisting on old bread donated by the local baker.
Unable to afford
new stationery, he wrote on the verso
side of old manuscripts. An outstanding warrant for assault
and unpaid
debts led to his being a fugitive in New York City for a
while".-Wikipedia on Pierce

Grigori
Perelman
Where was Grigori Perelman, after
being recognized for a proof of a famous mathematical
problem he proudly refused to even try to publish in a
journal,   having satisfied himself by posting it on a
mathematical site where mathematicians posted problems for
analysis by anyone who cared, and having recognized its
power his peers offering him the Fields Medal, the
mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize, along with the
Clay medal, which comes with a $1,000,000 award, which he
turned down? Living with his mother in Russia, having
shunned any further contact with the mathematical community
whom he is said to have described as soiling the purity of
the mathematical discipline.
Very entertaining:
"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 PrizeIn
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.

      
Possible Withdrawal from MathematicsPerelman 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 Perelman

Georg
Cantor  , John
Nash and Srinivasa
Ramanujan

On claims of being close to God,
what happened to Georg Cantor in connection with his
foundational work on infinity and other aspects of
mathematics, to John Nash who got the Nobel for his labours
in game theory?
Nash was hospitalized on account of
mental health issues, some related to his
claim that he was inspired to reach his mathematical
ideas through telepathic stimulation by non-human
intelligences.
Cantor "identified the
Absolute Infinite with God,and he considered his work on
transfinite numbers to have been directly
communicated to him by God, who had chosen Cantor to reveal
them to the
world"  (from Wikipedia on Cantor). In the midst of
fierce professional and psychological battles in connection
with challenges to his mathematical ideas, Cantor  was
hospitalized a no of times for depression and is described
as dying in one of such hospitalizations.
Ramanujan, famous for his self
taught genius in mathematics, also claimed his family
goddess inspired him, but since he did not display what was
seen as aberrant behavior, unlike Nash and Cantor, he had no
problems.
"A deeply religious Hindu,
Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities
to divinity, and stated that the mathematical knowledge he
displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess.
'"An equation for me has no meaning," he once
said, "unless it expresses a thought of
God."-Wikipedia on Ramanujan.
Archimedes

Archimedes, described,with Newton
and Friedrich Gauss, as one of the trio of three greatest
mathematicians in history,  the man who calculated the no
of grains of sand on the earth, was doing mathematical
calculations in the sand when the Romans invaded his city.
In the midst of the chaos, the bedlam from fleeing people,
he remained engrossed in his work. Was this not the same man
who had run naked into the street, shouting the now famous
'eureka!' after accidentally discovering in his bath
the principle of flotation? A Roman soldier came upon this
ridiculous creature who seemed not to know that a war was on
and challenged him. The abstracted master ignored the
military man, urging to be left alone to engage in a
worthwhile pursuit unlike whatever the troublemaker was on
about. The soldier promptly finished him off.
"Archimedes died c.
212 BC during the Second Punic War, when Roman forces under
General Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured the city of
Syracuse after a two-year-long siege. According to the
popular account given by Plutarch, Archimedes was
contemplating a mathematical diagram
when the city was captured. A Roman soldier commanded him
to come and
meet General Marcellus but he declined, saying that he had
to finish
working on the problem. The soldier was enraged by this, and
killed
Archimedes with his sword. Plutarch also gives a lesser-known
account of the death of Archimedes which suggests that he
may have been
killed while attempting to surrender to a Roman soldier.
According to
this story, Archimedes was carrying mathematical
instruments, and was
killed because the soldier thought that they were valuable
items.
General Marcellus was reportedly angered by the death of
Archimedes, as
he considered him a valuable scientific asset and had
ordered that he
not be harmed [as the US at the fall of Germany in WW2
salvaged the scientists who built Germany's military
rocket program and successfully used their skill in the US
space program]. Marcellus called Archimedes "a
geometrical Briareus" [ a kind of deity].
The 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.Chike
Obi
It is said in a Nigerian anecdote
illustrating how mathematics at a certain particularly
advanced level conduces to unconventional approaches to
reality, that the famous Nigerian mathematician Chike Obi
used to enter and leave his home through the window instead
of the door bcs the window was the shortest way out
according to his calculations.










.





On 18 December 2017 at
20:16, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
wrote:
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
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


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


104
Inner Campus Drive


Austin,
TX 78712-0220


USA


512
475 7224


512
475 7222 (fax)


http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba
-studies-review/


http://www.toyinfalola.com 


http://www.utexas.edu/conferen
ces/africa  


http://groups.google.com/group
/yorubaaffairs 



http://groups.google.com/group
/USAAfricaDialogue   
 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroup
s.com> on behalf of agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>

Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroup
s.com>

Date: Monday, December 18, 2017 at 5:15 AM

To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroup
s.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


 


 










 


 


_________________________


Ibukunolu Alao Babajide
(IBK)


(+2348061276622)

ibk2005@gmail.com




 

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 & Media


Social Science
Building 


Room 5092 MD
2207


402
Bartow Avenue

Kennesaw
State University



Kennesaw,
Georgia, USA 30144

Cell: (+1)
404-573-9697

Personal website:
www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter:
@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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