I guess the moral is “Don’t trust anyone but a mathematician”?
Theorems get published all the time that turn out to have incorrect proofs or to be not even theorems. There was about a decade long period in the late 19th century where there was a proof of the four color theorem that everyone thought was valid. And the middle of the 20th century there were serious issues with calculating homology groups and cohomology groups of spaces where people kept getting different answers. And then there are a handful of examples where theorems simply got more and more conditions tacked on to them as more counterexamples to the theorems became apparent. The Euler formula for polyhedra is possibly the most blatant such example.
So even the mathematicians aren’t always trustworthy.
The Euler formula for polyhedra is possibly the most blatant such example.
Huh? There are no counterexamples to the Euler characteristic of a polyhedra being 2, and the theorem has generalized beautifully. If anything conditions have been loosened as new versions of the theorem have been used in more places.
Huh? There are no counterexamples to the Euler characteristic of a polyhedra being 2, and the theorem has generalized beautifully. If anything conditions have been loosened as new versions of the theorem have been used in more places.
Well, what do you mean by polyhedron? Consider for example a cubic nut. Does this fit your intuition of a polyhedron? Well, since it has genus that is not equal to 1, it doesn’t have Euler characteristic 2. And the original proof that V+F-E=2 didn’t handle this sort of case. (That’s one reason why people often add convex as a condition, to deal with just this situation even though convex is in many respects stronger than what one needs.) Cauchy’s 1811 proof suffers from this problem as do some of the other early proofs (although his is repairable if one is careful). There are also other subtle issues that can go wrong and in fact do go wrong in a lot of the historical versions. Lakatos’s book “Proofs and Refutations” discusses this albeit in an essentially ahistorical fashion.
There are many things called “the Euler formula for polyhedron”, and you’re conflating all of them. Sounds like you missed the point of Proofs and Refutations.
Theorems get published all the time that turn out to have incorrect proofs or to be not even theorems. There was about a decade long period in the late 19th century where there was a proof of the four color theorem that everyone thought was valid. And the middle of the 20th century there were serious issues with calculating homology groups and cohomology groups of spaces where people kept getting different answers. And then there are a handful of examples where theorems simply got more and more conditions tacked on to them as more counterexamples to the theorems became apparent. The Euler formula for polyhedra is possibly the most blatant such example.
So even the mathematicians aren’t always trustworthy.
Huh? There are no counterexamples to the Euler characteristic of a polyhedra being 2, and the theorem has generalized beautifully. If anything conditions have been loosened as new versions of the theorem have been used in more places.
Well, what do you mean by polyhedron? Consider for example a cubic nut. Does this fit your intuition of a polyhedron? Well, since it has genus that is not equal to 1, it doesn’t have Euler characteristic 2. And the original proof that V+F-E=2 didn’t handle this sort of case. (That’s one reason why people often add convex as a condition, to deal with just this situation even though convex is in many respects stronger than what one needs.) Cauchy’s 1811 proof suffers from this problem as do some of the other early proofs (although his is repairable if one is careful). There are also other subtle issues that can go wrong and in fact do go wrong in a lot of the historical versions. Lakatos’s book “Proofs and Refutations” discusses this albeit in an essentially ahistorical fashion.
There are many things called “the Euler formula for polyhedron”, and you’re conflating all of them. Sounds like you missed the point of Proofs and Refutations.
Multiple actual historical versions (such as Cauchy’s proof) are wrong.