Elin Oxenhielm Update

First a little background history. My following the Oxenhielm case began when I forwarded to a friend, who is a mathematician, a link to this article (in Swedish) about which I then had no doubts as to being a report about a young Swedish student of mathematics solving an important problem.

But when my friend said that it wasn’t a rigorous proof and that it exhibited many obvious errors, I became interested. And the day after, I read that professor Torsten Ekedahl said that Oxenhielm’s solution was based on unproven results, and professor Rozenblioum sent me a copy of a letter he had sent to the journal, asking them to reconsider the decision to publish her paper.

After the weekend, I was getting a lot of traffic from Google searches on this matter. I was following the discussion at unstruct.org, which in combination with what my friend and people on Slashdot had said began to render an image quite different from the one reported in traditional media.

I heard rumors of Grigori Rozenblioum saying that Oxenhielm submitted the paper against her former advisor Yishao Zhou’s recommendation, so I asked him and he confirmed this by sending me a copy of an email she had sent him. He said I could publish it, so I did, but I asked Zhou about it afterwards, and she suggested that she’d publish something on her homepage, so I deleted it.

By now I was the top search result on Google when searching for “Elin Oxenhielm”, and traffic had increased even more. So I began to feel I had to follow this story as it developed. The fact that Elin Oxenhielm’s website was shut down, and that several people had said that her paper had been withdrawn from publication, together with the contents of Yishao Zhou’s open letter gave me the impression that the case was closed. So I posted this and indicated that I was interested in receiving reports of news about this from traditional media.

That was my interest from the beginning, to see how this story was reported in traditional (radio, newspapers) versus new media (weblogs). I’m not a mathematician.

So, what has happened since then is that Elin Oxenhielm contacted me, yesterday, saying that I needed “an update of the truth” in this matter. So she forwarded two emails sent to her in September from her former advisor Yishao Zhou. Both are replies to an email from Oxenhielm about the accepting of her paper by the journal Nonlinear Analysis. Zhou congratulates her and says she’s interested in reading the article and the referee reports.

Oxenhielm, in a second email, emphasized that it’s up to the mathematics community to judge whether her paper is correct. I agree. And she said that she puts a high value on being truthful and that she has remained truthful from the beginning of this story, and always will.

What I have done so far is reporting what very experienced mathematicians have written, online and in emails sent to me. I still haven’t read any mathematician testifying to the merit of Oxenhielm’s paper (as a solution to Hilbert’s 16th problem, that is). If you find one, please let me know.

What I haven’t done is speculating about who speaks the truth and who doesn’t, and I don’t have any intention to begin doing that now. Therefore I don’t want to interpret the meaning of the two emails Oxenhielm forwarded to me.

What I do want to do is to bring more clarity to this matter, as many people are visiting my weblog for information on this. I mentioned that what the blogosphere needs specialists, so if you are a mathematician and have something to say about this, please let me know. My interest all along has been the opposing stories told by traditional and new media in this matter.

Note: Finally, I have a correction. I have spoken of Yishao Zhou as being both Elin Oxenhielm’s professor and supervisor. The fact is, though, that Zhou was an advisor for Oxenhielm’s masters degree. She is neither her professor nor her current advisor. And the paper submitted to Nonlinear Analysis isn’t a paper that Zhou has been an advisor for (as she says in her open letter).