[chx]

Except Patrick Sole is a real mathematician who has been working in this area for some years now http://www.emis.de/journals/JTNB/2007-2/article03.pdf and so it's not easy to dismiss it just based on a name.

The most plausible explanation is https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/3vnrqj/two_authors_cl... here: "Zhu sent Sole some questions about his Robin inequality paper, including Zhu's ideas for proving RH. Sole responded, but there was some communication breakdown that led to Zhu thinking Sole endorsed his ideas. Zhu typed up his idea and added Sole's name to it in order to get the paper read. This is of course unethical, but given that Zhu thought his proof was correct, in his mind he was doing Sole a favor."

This was published on Saturday so my best guess is Patrick Sole on Monday will either post a refute or will claim it is true and everyone will shit a brick (unikely).

[silentvoice]

I wasn't clear enough. I was responding to the flow of comments of the form: "Riemann hypothesis is hard, this is unlikely to be true." Sure it's true, but doing a little more research could inform that opinion well past the zeroth-order approximation of "it's a hard problem."

I didn't actually take my own advice, I just wait for Terence Tao to write a post then I know it's true :)

[chx]

I think the average HNer will hear when a proof happens for real in just the everyday channels of theirs: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, HN etc will be FULL of it (with good reason). Remember the Higgs boson?