self-Godwining and Conservapedia's interesting take on Popperian falsifiability. Others have discussed Conservapedia's objections to special and general relativity. Now, Conservapedia is at it again.
Apparently, Conservapedia has taken a recent interest in mathematics. First, they added to their mainpage a take on the recent reports that Deolalikar had proven that P ≠ NP . Conservapedia announced:
University professors pile on against a non-professor's claim to have solved one of the millennium problems. MIT Assistant Professor Scott Aaronson declares, "Vinay Deolalikar still hasn’t retracted his P≠NP claim, but a clear consensus has emerged that the proof, as it stands, is fatally flawed." He absurdly adds, with a cite to Richard Dawkins, "the only miracle in life is that there are no miracles, neither in mathematics nor in anything else."
But the best of the public, aided by the internet, will inevitably solve more problems than liberal colleges will - just as Grigori Perelman solved another millennium problem. The future belongs to the conservative public.
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Apparently, Aaronson's decision to quote Richard Dawkins meant that math must be evil. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to note some of the other more glaring errors. However, this was not the end of Conservapedia's attack on establishment math for being just too liberal. Shortly after this declaration, an addition about the Fields Medal went up. The Fields Medal, awarded every four years, is for mathematics roughly equivalent to a Noble Prize(there is no Nobel in math). Conservapedia announced a "Conservapedia exclusive":
[T]his Thursday liberals will likely give the coveted Fields Medal -- math's highest honor -- to an underachieving woman and to a communist-trained mathematician from Vietnam. Is the lamestream media holding back stories about this to create a bigger splash on Thursday?
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It is not clear what "underachieving woman" Conservapedia is thinking of, but apparently the "communist-trained mathematician" is a reference to Ngo Bao Chau, who made headlines last year for proving the Fundamental Lemma of the Langlands program. Apparently Conservapedia believes that the general media cares so much about mathematics that a failure to speculate on who will win the Fields Medal is a sign of a media conspiracy. Why a "communist-trained" mathematician would be a big deal is not clear given thatabout half of the Fields Medal winners have been either from the USSR or trained in the USSR.
Also, apparently Conservapedia is unhappy that after Terence Tao got the Fields Medal four years ago he then endorsed Barack Obama for President, Finally, we come to the detail that forced me to write this blog entry. To deal with this apparent liberal bias and affirmative action in the Fields Medal, Conservapedia is starting its own award for mathematicians, the "ConservaMath Medal." According to the website this Medal is "the merit-based alternative to the Fields Medal, with winners announced at the same time so that real achievement is recognized." I'll let that speak for itself.
Posted by Joshua at 1:34 PM
Labels: conservapedia, mathema
Read the original post on: http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/2010/08/conservapedia-pnp-and-fields-medal.html
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