Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacobolus 1594 days ago
> no significant "wrong" result in the entire history of math since ancient times, nor has any significant result been jettisoned

This is a bit of an exaggeration. If you search around you can e.g. find https://mathoverflow.net/questions/35468/widely-accepted-mat... https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/139503/in-the-histo... https://mathoverflow.net/questions/27749/what-are-some-corre... https://mathoverflow.net/questions/879/most-interesting-math...

1 comments

Reading just the top answers from those threads, I see no significant results that have been disproved. Only the "intuitions" and "footnotes" and some "trivial assumptions" of mathematicians, but not an actual published result that was cited by other results and had significant consequences by invalidating other results.
You can't open the conversation offering "the entire history of math since ancient times" and then demand thoroughly modern things like "an actual published result that was cited by other results" as counter-evidence.

Nonetheless many of the examples in the above links still fit your criteria.

A published result that cites another result is not "a thoroughly modern thing". Mathematicians have been citing each other since Pythagoras and Avicenna.
How about Hilbert‘s 16th problem, would that satisfy your conditions for a counterclaim to your assertion? For a short summary, see https://mathoverflow.net/a/116530/60775 or https://valentermz.github.io/documents/slides/olivetti-2013-... for instance.

In any case, there is still the foundational crisis in the late 19th and early 20th century that‘s worth a mention.