Related papers: De Divino Errore
The uncountability of the reals was first established by Cantor in what was later heralded as the first paper on set theory. Since the latter constitutes the official foundations of mathematics, the logical study of the uncountability of…
An influential argument for scientific realism posits that, if scientific theories were not true, their empirical success would be a coincidence. Here, I show that the false Drude's theory succeeds in explaining the Wiedemann-Franz law by…
Since its introduction by P.L. Lions in his lectures and seminars at the College de France, see [9], and also the very helpful notes of Cardialaguet [4] on Lions' lectures, the Master Equation has attracted a lot of interest, and various…
This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to an erro thereon line -2 of page 4.
Two prominent conjectures by Herbert J. Ryser have been falsely attributed to a somewhat obscure conference proceedings that he wrote in German. Here we provide a translation of that paper and try to correct the historical record at least…
The Erd\H{o}s-Straus conjecture is a renowned problem which describes that for every natural number $n~(\ge 2)$, $\frac{4}{n}$ can be represented as the sum of three unit fractions. The main purpose of this study is to show that the…
A mistake is pointed out in EGA I, Elements of algebraic geometry, concerning corollary (2.4.4) which is not correct. Quite likely, the hitch has already been noticed, and reported, but we know not who, nor where. New research is…
Four hundred years after its publication, Galileo's masterpiece Sidereus Nuncius is still a mine of useful information for historians of science and astronomy. In his short book Galileo reports a large amount of data that, despite its age,…
In his book Topics in Analytic Number Theory, Rademacher considered the generating function of partitions into at most $N$ parts, and conjectured certain limits for the coefficients of its partial fraction decomposition. We carry out an…
Four critical elementary mathematical mistakes in Joy Christian's counterexample to Bell's theorem are presented. Consequently, Joy Christian's hidden variable model cannot reproduce any quantum mechanics results and cannot be used as a…
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli is commonly credited with performing the first precise experiments to determine the acceleration of a freely falling body. Riccioli has been discussed by historians of science, sometimes…
A formal axiomatic mathematical framework for Boolos' Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever is presented and two theorems about its solvability are proved. By strictly following Boolos' instructions (in particular, the requirement that all gods are…
It has been commonly argued, on the basis of Goedel's theorem and related mathematical results, that true artificial intelligence cannot exist. Penrose has further deduced from the existence of human intelligence that fundamental changes in…
O. Einstein (2008) proved Bollob\'as-type theorems on intersecting families of ordered sets of finite sets and subspaces. Unfortunately, we report that the proof of a theorem on ordered sets of subspaces had a mistake. We prove two weaker…
It is shown that a recent article by Z.-D. Zhang [arXiv:0705.1045] is in error and violates well-known theorems.
The aim of this paper, triggered by some discussions in the astrophysics community raised by astro-ph/0508529, is to introduce the issue of `fits' from a probabilistic perspective (also known as Bayesian), with special attention to the…
All priors are not created equal. There are right and there are wrong priors. That is the main conclusion of this contribution. I use, a cooked-up example designed to create drama, and a typical textbook example to show the pervasiveness of…
Paper withdrawn due to an error into the equations of the probability amplitudes.
This paper argues that, insofar as we doubt the bivalence of the Continuum Hypothesis or the truth of the Axiom of Choice, we should also doubt the consistency of third-order arithmetic, both the classical and intuitionistic versions.…
To counter a general belief that all the paradoxes stem from a kind of circularity (or involve some self--reference, or use a diagonal argument) Stephen Yablo designed a paradox in 1993 that seemingly avoided self--reference. We turn…