[math-fun] Penrose tilings, pharmaceuticals and crankery
Greetings. Today I received a rather unusual and completely unsolicited e-mail from one Klee Irwin, mentioning the glider I found on a Penrose tiling cellular automaton:
----- Original Message ----- From: Klee Irwin <Klee@QuantumGravityResearch.org> Sent: 01/12/14 09:07 AM To: apgoucher@gmx.com
Hi, Adam. Congrats on the Penrose tile glider. Would you have time to do some paid consulting for our group?
Approaching this with the deserved amount of suspicion and scepticism, I proceeded to Google `Klee Irwin'. Apparently he owns several businesses, including a nutriceutical company that was sued $2.65 million for selling pills with an illegal concentration of lead. I've read numerous complaints from people who were apparently defrauded by him. Also, there are news stories of him investing six-figure sums in certain companies. His `group' has also published some mathematical papers, including this one: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.1446v1.pdf Note that the claimed result is actually false; consider projecting a rhombus onto a diagonal, for instance. Even if it were true, it would surely be a trivial application of Huygens-Steiner or some variant thereof. Judging by this evidence, Irwin appears to be a crank. So, why has this person contacted me ex caeruleo? Sincerely, Adam P. Goucher
I was momentarily confused by "ex caeruleo" -- but then the light dawned. Looking at the paper I notice that the statement is for a N-dimensional polytope in R^N whose group of "proper" symmetries (rotations) is edge-transitive. So this would not apply to a rhombus in the plane. --Dan On 2014-01-12, at 8:37 AM, Adam P. Goucher wrote: . . .
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.1446v1.pdf
Note that the claimed result is actually false; consider projecting a rhombus onto a diagonal, for instance. Even if it were true, it would surely be a trivial application of Huygens-Steiner or some variant thereof. . . . So, why has this person contacted me ex caeruleo?
* Adam P. Goucher <apgoucher@gmx.com> [Jan 12. 2014 18:31]:
Greetings.
Today I received a rather unusual and completely unsolicited e-mail from one Klee Irwin, mentioning the glider I found on a Penrose tiling cellular automaton:
----- Original Message ----- From: Klee Irwin <Klee@QuantumGravityResearch.org> Sent: 01/12/14 09:07 AM To: apgoucher@gmx.com
Hi, Adam. Congrats on the Penrose tile glider. Would you have time to do some paid consulting for our group?
[...]
So, why has this person contacted me
He wants to "buy" your name/brain to gain (scientific) credibility. You will have to check that he won't claim any sort of cooperation with you. Suggest to just give a short "No thanks.", then play dead. Don't get drawn into any conversions of any kind! Do keep copies of all his mails.
ex caeruleo?
What does "ex caeruleo" mean? (learning English on math-fun: fun!)
Sincerely,
Adam P. Goucher
Best, jj
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On Jan 12, 2014, at 11:37 AM, Adam P. Goucher <apgoucher@gmx.com> wrote:
His `group' has also published some mathematical papers, including this one:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.1446v1.pdf
Note that the claimed result is actually false; consider projecting a rhombus onto a diagonal, for instance. Even if it were true, it would surely be a trivial application of Huygens-Steiner or some variant thereof.
Judging by this evidence, Irwin appears to be a crank.
There's a difference between having no academic credentials and being a crank. Relationships of the kind claimed in the above paper (I have not examined this particular one in detail) have been very useful in the study of the Penrose tiling and quasiperiodic tilings more generally. For example, the density of a motif in one of these tilings turns out to be simply related to the ratio of volumes of certain polytopes. The first author of the above paper, Kovacs, found a typo in a paper on this subject I coauthored with Neil Sloane. -Veit
participants (4)
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Adam P. Goucher -
Dan Asimov -
Joerg Arndt -
Veit Elser