“It is simply too vague and unspecific.” Veisdal added that he would need to examine the written proof more closely to make a definitive judgement.
Science contacted several of Atiyah’s colleagues. They all expressed concern about his desire to come out of retirement to present proofs based on shaky associations and said it was unlikely that his proof of the Riemann hypothesis would be successful.
John Baez, a mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, was one of the few willing to put his name to critical remarks about Atiyah’s claim. “The proof just stacks one impressive claim on top of another without any connecting argument or real substantiation,” he says.
