Flutterby™! : Citing outside of academia

Fascinating. RT Robin Houston @robinhouston:

A curious situation. The best known lower bound for the minimal length of superpermutations was proved by an anonymous user of a wiki mainly devoted to anime. http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem

The proof essentially works, I think. See the end of this thread for what I mean by that: https://groups.google.com/foru...pic/superpermutators/j5y24bOemiM

But because it isn’t part of The Literature, other mathematicians are reluctant to cite it or rely on it in their work. So it’s in a strange limbo state.

Actually, I get the impression the proof was originally posted to 4chan, and was copied to the wiki by someone else, which is why it’s credited to Anonymous.

I think this is an archive of the original 4chan thread about the problem: http://4watch.org/superstring/

Here is another write-up of the anonymous proof, by Jay Pantone: https://docs.google.com/viewer...M3eTVCUUFKATAuMQEBdjI&authuser=0

Hot news! The original 4chan thread in which the proof was posted is archived at https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197 Many thanks to the anonymous internet sleuth who dug this up and sent it to me.