The Endeavour

Jenga is a game where you start with a tower of wooden pegs and take turns removing pegs until someone makes the tower collapse. A style of mathematics analogous to Jenga reached the height of its popularity about 40 years ago and then fell out of fashion. I use the phrase “Jenga mathematics” to refer to generalizing a well-known theorem by weakening its hypotheses, seeing how many pegs you can pull out before it falls.

Many 20th century mathematicians spent their careers going over the work of 19th century mathematicians, removing every hypothesis they could. Sometimes a 20th century mathematician would get his name tacked on to a 19th century theorem due to his Jenga accomplishments.

Taken to extremes, Jenga mathematics turns theorems inside-out and proofs become hypotheses. Natural hypotheses are replaced with a laundry list of properties necessary to make the proof work. Start with some theorem of the form “Let X be a widget. Then X has a foozle.” Go back over the proof and see just what features of a widget are needed for the proof. Then restate the theorem as “Let X have the following apparently arbitrary list of properties necessary for my proof to work. Then X has a foozle.” Never mind whether anybody can think of anything other that a widget that satisfies the hypotheses of the new theorem.

Jenga mathematics is no longer fashionable. Mathematicians still value removing unneeded hypotheses, but they’re not as willing to go to extremes to do so. They are more interested in building new towers than in removing every piece possible from old towers.

The book Out of Their Minds quotes Leslie Lamport on proofs:

The proofs have been carried out to an excruciating level of detail … The reader may feel that we have given long, tedious proofs of obvious assertions. However, what he has not seen are the many equally obvious assertions that we discovered to be wrong only by trying to write similarly long, tedious proofs.                   

See Lamport’s paper How to Write a Proof. See also Complementary validation.

Mark Dominus brought up an interesting question last month: have there been major screw-ups in mathematics? He defines a “major screw-up” to be a flawed proof of an incorrect statement that was accepted for a significant period of time. He excludes the case of incorrect proofs of statements that were nevertheless true.

It’s remarkable that he can even ask the question. Can you imagine someone asking with a straight face whether there have ever been major screw-ups in, say, software development? And yet it takes some hard thought to come up with examples of really big blunders in math.

No doubt there are plenty of flawed proofs of false statements in areas too obscure for anyone to care about. But in mainstream areas of math, blunders are usually uncovered very quickly. And there are examples of theorems that were essentially correct but neglected some edge case. Proofs of statements that are just plain wrong are hard to think of. But Mark Dominus came up with a few.

Yesterday he gave an example of a statement by Kurt Gödel that was flat-out wrong but accepted for over 30 years. Warning: reader discretion advised. His post is not suitable for those who get queasy at the sight of symbolic logic.