There was a weird but interesting article in the May 7th Oregonian, "The Riddle in Room 114," by reporter Tom Hallman. It was a literary journalistic attempt to tell the story of Mark Provo, a obsessed 43-year old man who has been living hand-to-mouth in a motel for the last three years, trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Provo seems to get by on small donations from various benefactors who want to support his work.
The story leads to Provo's web site, where he's posted his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, and where until recently he had a document that he claims is important for "national security." (I was able to read it before he took it down.) Needless to say, Provo is a complete crank. Sincere, but still a crank. He has no more proved Fermat's Last Theorem than I have found the Holy Grail. His mathematics consist of simplistic statements that often follow little to no logic, and his results are all in his imagination.
What was even worse was the document on national security, which was pure numerology that had to do with the number of letters in words like "World Trade Center" and "tsumani" and other trivia. Provo would count these letters in various ways and associate them with dates and other types of numbers. He's now apparently waiting to announce his findings on live television once someone pays attention to him. Really.
It's all fairly ridiculous, except that he's gotten 15,000+ hits since the Oregonian article appeared and a few people are actually giving him money. As of today he says he's gotten 13 contributors, and notes that "money is desperately needed at this point." That annoys me, because I think in a way it's taking advantage of people's ignorance. Sure, Provo is upfront about the details of his work (at least, he was until he took down the recent "national security" document), and he's free to hang up his shingle and make his case. But his work has never been published in peer-reviewed literature, and as far as I can tell he's never even submitted it to peer-review. He refuses to accept the judgement of professional mathematicians (see below), and he's holding his work out as revolutionary when it's anything but.
The Oregonian article also annoyed me because there are so many real mathematicians in this world who deserve a Sunday, front page, above-the-fold, three-page article about their work, and the paper chose to profile a quack. People are free to do what they want with their money, but hopefully some of them will read this first.
UPDATE: To give Hallman and the Oregonian some credit, they weren't really that gullible about Provo's claim to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. They arranged for a professional mathematician to read his work, Neal Koblitz, a math professor at the University of Washington. Kobliltz, of course, said Provo did not have a proof, but he seemed too polite to say that it wasn't really mathematics. So the newspaper was kinda more-or-less appropriately skeptical. I'm still going to wait for them to profile a real mathematician.
In a May 23rd blog entry, Oregonian editor Jack Hart had more to say about their story, saying that "in hindsight, Provo was not the appropriate subject for such a story."
May 27, 2006
ReplyDeleteFrom Mark Provo: This ridiculous posting is completely bogus and mischaracterizes EVERYTHING about this situation. I have a degree in mathematics from the University of Washington and was Chairman of the Mathematics Department at the Overlake School. This man contacted me by email but revealed himself to be a closed-minded and biased jerk who became obsessed with me. I had to stop responding to his letters. This attack on me is intentional and false. He couldn't wait to send me the link to this posting. I will refute each section completely.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Mark Provo and Fermat's Last Theorem
There was a weird but interesting article in the May 7th Oregonian, "The Riddle in Room 114," by reporter Tom Hallman. It was a literary journalistic attempt to tell the story of Mark Provo, a obsessed . . .
STOP! I am not "obsessed" with anything. To him, anybody who works hard and displays commitment to important work is "obsessed" if sacrifice is involved, a total cartoon.
. . .43-year old man who has been living hand-to-mouth in a motel for the last three years, trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. . .
STOP! He is just repeating the LIE of the completely fictionalized Oregonian article, which I have refuted at length in two documents posted on my site, www.markprovo.com; first the line-by-line rebuttal to the original article (written by a self-described "math idiot"), and second the total refutation of the erroneous blog statement by the editor Jack Hart. Notice that this poster tells you nothing of the reason that I was in the motel. My benefactor's money was embezzled by his crooked lawyer, just as I was moving, and that is what put me there. I was stuck in that situation as I found it impossible to be heard for consideration for funding, because of the way all of our systems are set up, as had been true prior to this event. The benefactor, a man living in Vista, California, was met by a private referral.
. . . Provo seems to get by on small donations from various benefactors who want to support his work. . . .
Yes, because these people actually know me and my work, which they know is important to our future, and that is why they have supported me.
. . . The story leads to Provo's web site, where he's posted his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, and where until recently he had a document that he claims is important for "national security." (I was able to read it before he took it down.) Needless to say, Provo is a complete crank. [FALSE!] Sincere, but still a crank. He has no more proved Fermat's Last Theorem than I have found the Holy Grail. His mathematics consist of simplistic statements that often follow little to no logic, and his results are all in his imagination. . .
This is outrageous. My work is in Observer Mathematics, physics, and national security. This person clearly cannot follow an explanation and has only selectively "looked at" (not actually read in detail or understood) what is in my papers. The Fermat material is only 18 pages of a 109-page text. The bulk text is on the discovery of Observer Mathematics. Notice that he says not one word about this, a complete and beautiful system that for the first time shows the reasons for the structure of arithmetic and all of the other basic mathematical operations. He has just disregarded this because it does not fit with his cartoon idea of me. The claim that my work follows 'little or no logic' is just stupid and ridiculous, as anyone who would actually read the texts would see.
In regard to the national security matter, I had placed a document providing a simple, introductory explanation of things for a mass audience, regarding two main topics. He wrote to me to ask questions about this. In one case he asked a question that was answered right in the text, proving that he had not really read it, but only scanned it, or whatever. . . .
. . .What was even worse was the document on national security, which was pure numerology that had to do with the number of letters in words like "World Trade Center" and "tsumani" and other trivia. Provo would count these letters in various ways and associate them with dates and other types of numbers.
ABSOLUTELY AND COMPLETELY FALSE. This statement proves he did not read it. This man is monumentally biased against anything new, and that is why he does not correctly characterize me or my work. There is no counting of the number of letters in anything as he describes. He is engaged in propaganda. According to him, no new ideas should be examined, and if they are, they should be rejected a priori and ridiculed into a false cartoon version. . . .
. . He's now apparently waiting to announce his findings on live television once someone pays attention to him. Really. . . .
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT. THIS IS FALSE AND JUST MADE UP BY HIM!
It's all fairly ridiculous, except that he's gotten 15,000+ hits since the Oregonian article appeared and a few people are actually giving him money. As of today he says he's gotten 13 contributors, and notes that "money is desperately needed at this point." That annoys me, because I think in a way it's taking advantage of people's ignorance. Sure, Provo is upfront about the details of his work (at least, he was until he took down the recent "national security" document). . .
STOP! He does not tell you that I had to take the text down because the material on the 1600-Year Historical Cycle that tests civilizations around the nodes of 1200 B.C., 400, and 2000 reveals the true nature of the threat to America and Western Civilization, including detailing the actual plots and plans of the Islamic terrorists (notice that he does not mention that this is part of the document, because it cannot be refuted). I was almost lured into a trap set by these terrorists last weekend and had to remove the document for these security reasons.
. . .and he's free to hang up his shingle and make his case. But his work has never been published in peer-reviewed literature, and as far as I can tell he's never even submitted it to peer-review. . . .
I explained this at length to him in response to his first email. I HAVE tried that, but unless one is a university professor academic journals discard such papers unread. They give no reply and you cannot get any information about what is going on. Maybe there are exceptions but I could not find them. This is a red herring that only tries to shift the focus off of the fact that the mathematics and physics papers are available right now on the site, and have recently created an explosion of interest, in that there were 10,000 hits just yesterday.
. . . He refuses to accept the judgement of professional mathematicians (see below), and he's holding his work out as revolutionary when it's anything but. . .
Absolute nonsense. If this is true, then why has word or mouth among them created such sudden interest, and why have I been endlessly trying to make that happen?
. . . The Oregonian article also annoyed me because there are so many real mathematicians in this world who deserve a Sunday, front page, above-the-fold, three-page article about their work, and the paper chose to profile a quack. . . .
This man told me he "used to be a scientist." He is the quack. He is engaged in transference of his own state onto me (he has been fixated on me since the article came out).
. . . People are free to do what they want with their money, but hopefully some of them will read this first.
UPDATE: To give Hallman and the Oregonian some credit, they weren't really that gullible about Provo's claim to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. They arranged for a professional mathematician to read his work, Neal Koblitz, a math professor at the University of Washington. Kobliltz, of course, said Provo did not have a proof, but he seemed too polite to say that it wasn't really mathematics. . . .
STOP! How many times does this have to be refuted? Koblitz did not read the paper. He told me he skipped the first 73 pages, only 'scanned' the pages of the Fermat section until he thought he saw something 'wrong,' cited that, and got out. But he was wrong. He said there were 'no logical arguments' to support what he saw on the page, but that was because those things are in the 73-page background that precedes the discussion of Fermat! This was not a "review" of any kind. I ask any reasonable person to examine the actual facts. All of these details are found in my rebuttal on my site. This paper is about the entire system of Observer Mathematics (which, you should note, this poster makes no comment on). Koblitz did not read any of it. Now that professors have actually read it, 10,000 hits in one day is the result.
. . . So the newspaper was kinda more-or-less appropriately skeptical.
FALSE CHARACTERIZATION. Read my rebuttal on the site for details.
. . . I'm still going to wait for them to profile a real mathematician.
In a May 23rd blog entry, Oregonian editor Jack Hart had more to say about their story, saying that "in hindsight, Provo was not the appropriate subject for such a story."
STOP! I posted a complete refutation of his erroneous comments and this can be found by anyone at the bottom of my site. I even received a secret letter from a man at the Oregonian agreeing with me and telling me that Hart's comments were merely self-serving.
To this poster: Stop writing this garbage about me and stop sending me emails.
Mark Provo
I applaud David Appell for posting Mark's 'refutation' to his blog entry. Especially telling is this part:
ReplyDeleteSTOP! He does not tell you that I had to take the text down because the material on the 1600-Year Historical Cycle that tests civilizations around the nodes of 1200 B.C., 400, and 2000 reveals the true nature of the threat to America and Western Civilization, including detailing the actual plots and plans of the Islamic terrorists (notice that he does not mention that this is part of the document, because it cannot be refuted). I was almost lured into a trap set by these terrorists last weekend and had to remove the document for these security reasons."
Now what exactly does historical cycles and threats to western civilizations have to do with mathematics at all? What a nutjob! Provo's response speaks for itself. Especially the last sentence of this paragraph, showing he is clearly mentally ill. Perhaps a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from co-morbidity that includes a potpourri of other mental illnesses, like antisocial personality disorder and/or narcissistic personality disorder. He definitely possesses delusions of grandeur. What a wacko!
This response was originally intended for the thread on Mark Provo on the urbanhonking.com blogsite. But seeing as how that thread can no longer be posted to, I am posting it here.
ReplyDeleteI am a former student of Mark's at Overlake High School of which he claims so often and everywhere that he was the Chairman of.
The honest truth of the matter was that at our tiny high school we had TWO math teachers, and Mark Provo WASN'T EVEN THE GOOD ONE. You can ask ANYONE that was a former student of his.
He also wrote a book, as a previous poster mentioned, called "The Collapse of my Christian Beliefs" where he spends almost the entire book attempting to debunk Christianity with such poorly constructed logic that it would never pass the litmus test of real skeptics like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. The most hilarious part was how he ended his book with a sentence something along the lines of, "This is why my belief in Christianity collapsed, which is why I now believe in Seth". It's like huh!??! Mark Provo was referring to the Seth Material, a series of books written by author Jane Roberts who was a famous medium in the sixties and seventies that channeled a personality named Seth. The Seth Materials are the channeled words verbatim of this "personality" that saw itself as an educator of humans about the metaphysical nature of 'reality'. You can still find this joke of a book (self published of course) by Mark Provo "The collapse of my Christian beliefs" in used bookstores in the Seattle area.
Mark then took it upon himself to begin channeling entities himself, including JFK and the Seth Material author Jane Roberts. It was at this time that Mark claimed that he was in fact the second coming of Christ, and those of us that were sane realized he had gone off the deep end. Those that didn't have it all together upstairs became followers of his into his New Age cult, of which he was the professed Messiah.
It was this previous rebuttal on this thread by Mark that had me literally rolling on the floor laughing so hard and compelled me to post this:
"and they began making outrageous posts calling me all kinds of names and so forth, all by people who do not even know me or anything about my work (they are crazy drug users!)."
The pot is clearly calling the kettle black, as anyone that knew Mark remembers how heavily he was into the drug scene at that time. I'm not sure exactly what he was smoking before constantly repeating the line 'you don't know anything about me, so stop posting about me and leave me alone'. Well for anyone that DID know him like I did, I wonder if it ever occurred to him that what those people would say about him would be FAR FAR worse than anything he's encountered thus far. Sorry Mark, but your begging the question by pointing out that your critics do not even know you and calling them crazy drug users required my to respond in good conscience. That's the good thing about the internet, which is why you so despise it, because it provides TRANSPARENCY.
I also find it comical that for someone that yearns so much for fame, comparing himself and the rejection of his ideas in the same breath as Einstein, can be so devoid of common sense. He lusts for the hero worship of being recognized as some brilliant mathematician that revolutionizes the field, yet can't handle the criticism that accompanies the slightest bit of fame. Hey Mark, remember that Einstein DID have his PhD in physics. You have never bothered to pursue graduate school, even though it would seem from your recommendations and your undergraduate degree you could be accepted somewhere. Then you could write your thesis on this grand revelation of yours. What could you possibly be afraid of other than to learn in graduate school information that entirely refutes your ideas and makes them look silly in retrospect? By pursuing higher education, you could also finally have a real job and earn your own money rather than relying on the gullibility of others that you call 'benefactors' that do not have the background, and are therefore not in position to make a sound judgment on your paper.
Mark Provo is clearly a victim of mental illness, as his rebuttal to David Appell's blog on him (web address posted previously in this thread) clearly indicates how far off on the deep end he is.
I guess you have heard of Mark's tragic demise by now...
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.oregonlive.com/oregonianeditors/2008/03/
Really?! Tragic demise? More like a hastening of the inevitable. This man was destined to die by his own hand, as so many lunatics are.
Delete