He also says bizarre stuff about numbers and particles and pyramids and ether. He even claims to have written a book on math and that he's found the "most efficient algorithm to compute zeros of the zeta function", as well as having settled the Riemann hypothesis. He has this vast trove of posts ready outlining his crank takes on everything. I know one from crank forums who's got, like, pre-made responses to everything. I don't understand where these people come from. "There's a fine line between genius and insanity" I'd be keen to see of other examples like this, or even similar stories whether they are documented or not. I hope this brings a smile to some of the people here who have been around internet discussions for a very long time. What I find significant about this quoted text is that this is the only time I have ever seen Plutonium admit being wrong to anything. I think he gets the time of the post wrong, but yeah he gets a lot of things wrong. In the reply after that, Plutonium writes: "I HAVE MADE SOME TYPOS, AND MINOR ERRORS IN MY 9JAN94, 16:30:33 GMT POSTING." Sorry about the all caps, I am just cut-and-pasting his text. It is amazing that Tao makes sense out of a lot of what Plutonium writes, and even says at the beginning that Ludwig is "absolutely correct so far." Towards the middle, Tao finds problems, saying "This already makes this proof invalid, but let's continue anyway." And the more Tao goes, the more flaws he finds. It certainly starts off pretty crazy, trying to link the Zeta function to protons, electrons, and neutrons: that was classic Ludwig, and no I will not try to explain any of this craziness. I don't think this is readable by most mathematicians. Plutonium claims to have two proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis. So that's another example, but let's get back to Tao and Plutonium. Of course there is the case of when Hardy opened his mind to considering Ramanujan - before Ramanujan was known to the world, and Hardy had no reason to believe he was anything serious until he tried out a few of the formulas that were posted to him. I have other examples like this, but this one is by far my favourite. I think this is a great example of how many great mathematicians are open to communicating with just about anybody. I was finally able to dig up an old sci.math Usenet group discussion between one of the world's greatest mathematicians (Terry Tao - though this was way before he won his field medal) and one of the Internet's greatest lunatics ( Ludwig Plutonium, who has changed his name several times over the years), so I'd thought I'd share it here and ask if people have other great examples of discussions like this.
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