Wiles Note to Escultura Clearly a Hoax

Alecks Pabico at the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) has confirmed that the note purported to be from Dr. Andrew Wiles is a hoax. The original message was not an email, but a note in a guestbook on Dr. Edgar Escultura's website. Clearly that could have been left by anyone. Pabico has contacted Wiles by email, and Wiles denies having any knowledge of the original message or of Dr. Escultura's website.

This is an interesting tidbit from PCIJ:

My sense is that Dr. Escultura and the Manila Times (and ABS-CBN Interactive which was the only other news site that carried the report) had been had here. And the writer of the report — Rony Diaz, the Times former publisher and now its CEO — and the Times editors could have spared readers this non-news, to put it mildly, had they only done their homework.

The author of the Times report is also the CEO and former publisher. I guess we know now why his boss didn't make him check the facts before publishing.

See our four previous posts on this topic starting from this one. Be sure to check out the external link in that post to the story of mathematicians going wild in the streets.

Technorati: Wiles, Fermat, Escultura, mathematics