Category: math retractions

Twenty-four years after submitting a manuscript on quantum algebra to the preprint server arXiv, a mathematician has now withdrawn it. 

Boris Shoikhet, then of the Independent University of Moscow, posted “Lifting formulas, Moyal product, and Feigin spectral sequence,” to arXiv on Oct. 28, 1998, proposing new conjectures in the field of quantum algebra. 

Last month, he withdrew the article, with the comment, “The paper has been withdrawn due to a crucial mistake in the arguments.”

A mathematician has requested the retraction of two recently published articles “claiming proofs of big results in number theory,” as one observer put it. 

After publication, the author said he “found some subtle inaccuracies” in the work. 

The editor-in-chief of the mathematics journal Studia Logica, where the papers were published, posted a notice to the publication’s website weeks ago stating that it had retracted the two articles. 

But the online versions of the papers still show no signs of having been retracted, as the editors wait on their publisher, Springer Nature, to process the retractions. 

A math professor named as a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate Analytics has had his third paper retracted after issues with it were flagged last year.

The mathematician, Abdon Atangana, is a professor at The University of the Free State, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and China Medical University, Taiwan. 

Atangana’s article, “Derivative with two fractional orders: A new avenue of investigation toward revolution in fractional calculus,” was published in The European Physical Journal Plus — where Atangana is an editor — on Oct. 24, 2016, and has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

A physicist who in 2016 threatened to sue Elsevier after the publisher retracted one of his papers has lost another article over concerns about the “integrity of the mathematics” in the paper. 

The article, “Eight-dimensional octonion-like but associative normed division algebra,” by Joy Christian, of the Einstein Centre for Local-Realistic Physics in Oxford, UK, appeared in Communications in Algebra in July 2020. According to the notice: 

Can two articles about aspects of Schrödinger’s work exist in the literature at the same time if they have plagiarized from other papers about the same subjects?

The first paper, “Fixed point theorems for solutions of the stationary Schrödinger equation on cones,” appeared in 2015 and was written by Gaixian Xue, of Henan University of Economics and Law in China, and Eve Yuzbasi, of Istanbul University. According to the retraction notice, from Fixed Point Theory and Applications: 

Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the story of a paper about gender differences by two mathematicians. Last month, in Weekend Reads, we highlighted an account of that story, which appeared in Quillette.

The piece, by one of the paper’s authors — titled “Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole” — touches on issues familiar to those who follow the culture wars, which isn’t all that surprising given the controversial topic, one once discussed by then-Harvard president Larry Summers.

The piece has generated a great deal of conversation, some of it quite heated, and a number of participants in those conversations have suggested that seeing the emails that the author of the Quillette piece says support his account would be useful. That’s what this post is mostly designed to do: Surface those emails. Continue reading What really happened when two mathematicians tried to publish a paper on gender differences? The tale of the emails