A brilliant career seemed to be in the offing, but suddenly, the news came that this promising mathematician had left academia and turned to politics. The former assistant professor embarked on a campaign to become the Democrat’s State Representative in Illinois’ 17 District. “I felt that I could contribute more to society by getting involved in politics than in mathematics,” Biss explained later.

Truth be told, by then, Biss’s mathematical star had already lost a lot of its luster. Nikolai Mnev, a mathematician at the Steklov Institute ion St. Petersburg, Russia, had taken a closer look at Biss’s proofs and detected a subtle error. In response to Mnev’s complaint, Biss wrote that he had already been alerted to this problem by other experts in the field and that it would soon be fixed. Laura Anderson from State University of New York at Binghamton was in the process or ironing out the problem.

Years passed, however, without Anderson, Biss, or anybody else, for that matter, publishing a correction of the mistake. On the other hand, Biss already failed to withdraw his work. Mnev received no clear answers to his repeated requests for clarification as to where things stood. Robert MacPherson from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who was editor of Annals of Mathematics when Biss’s work was published, also chose to remain silent. Mnev was irritated and let it be known. Biss was a nice chap, he wrote to friends; his advisors were eminent mathematicians; the journals in which the proofs were published were serious. But apparently, the system could simply not cope when an unprecedented event occurred.

In September 2007, Mnev, by then totally frustrated, put a two-page note onto the Internet. First, he expressed his regret at having to draw attention to the serious flaw, but he regarded it as his unfortunate duty to do so. While the mistake he had uncovered rendered Biss’s work invalid, it still had not been withdrawn after four years. This was even more alarming, Mnev felt, since other mathematicians, who were not yet aware of the mistake, had, in the meantime, begun to build upon the faulty proof. Soon, much effort would have been spent in vain on developing theories that were based on an erroneous result.

It took yet another year for Biss to finally admit that the proof of his main result was not fixable. On 11 November 2008 he finally submitted an erratum to the Annals of Mathematics and one month later to the Advances in Mathematics. In between these letters there was more bad fortune for Biss: he narrowly lost the election in his district by 1.774 votes.

This should have been the end of a sorry chain of events. But the journals took their time in publishing the errata. While it had been very painful to the young author to admit his mistake, the journals apparently found it more painful still to own up to their fallibility. Only in March, 2009, four months after Biss had sent his letters, and only after outsiders began demanding explanations, did the journals recall the flawed pieces of work from their websites.

Thankfully, there is always somebody who sees the bright side of things. In this case, it was Robert MacPherson, the previous editor of the Annals of Mathematics. “It is extraordinary,” he commented, “how mathematics tends to correct itself.” Mistakes cannot persist; sooner or later they will be found out. And what does Mnev--who for years had unsuccessfully tried to have the flawed papers corrected--think about the whole affair? It reminded him of the communist era, he writes with a wry sense of humor. It you wanted a leaky roof repaired, you were better off contacting a reporter from the party newspaper Pravda, than getting officials to have the repair done.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3925103&forum_id=2#35657132)

"The mistake is the same for both papers, it is very simple, looks almost like a typo, but it is located in the key propositions for the induction towers"

ljl @ academia

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3925103&forum_id=2#35657139)