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!

Iran colour-coded religious badges story 'untrue'

BAD National Post. (Here is their retraction.)

Given the sources [not including the writer of the original news story], and given the previous statements of the Iranian President, we felt confident the story was true and decided to publish it.

The reaction was immediate and distressing. Several experts whom the reporter had tried unsuccessfully to contact the day before called to say the story was not true.

(quote from Canadian Journalist - note partisan-ness)

Sometimes people wait.

(no subject)

I just read "Mine the Primes" (on the Internet. I am the first person to discover that! Julian Todd really does work at Freesteel.) and its very suggestive final sentence. I'm not sure why, but the idea of finding or discovering a piece of mathematics, especially one which is really beautiful or powerful, under dramatic circumstances, as in "Proof" or "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture" or Evariste Galois or Srinivasa Ramanujan's notebooks or "Gomez" or "Mine the Primes" and certainly others, has a lot of narrative power.

I wonder how come? Some curiously-shaped gear concealed behind the mind of the world seems to be raising the star of mathematics, pure math, so that it has become an object of great respect to everybody. I love that, but I find it mysterious. I hope that the "platonic" appreciation is deepening into an actual increase in study.

Anyway, read the story.

Example: [Amir Aczel]

"Although he knew most of the other mathematicians who came to the specialized conference from around the world, Wiles kept to himself. When colleagues became curious about the length of his scheduled presentation, Wiles would only say they should come to his lectures and find out for themselves. ( Such secretiveness was unusual, even for a mathematician... )

("Overnight, Wiles became the most famous, in fact the only famous, mathematician in the world")

And a nice pithy quote: "So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, is the culmination of, and couldn't exist without, the many months of stumbling around in the dark that precede it."