It's a Jacobian determinant and three points. You can check this yourself in Sage.

The author is a Princeton math doctorate.

playing devil's advocate a little bit, but wikipedia does have a policy against original research. If you published an obviously correct counterexample to wikipedia which is not anywhere else on the internet (or in a book, etc), the rules are clear: the counterexample must be removed.

in this case it's not original research, because there's a tweet by someone with a good reputation, and plenty of comments on said tweet corroborating the result. But it's a more sketchy "secondary source" than most wikipedia references and some caution on the part of the editors is not out of place.

(saying this as the person who made the original edit to the wikipedia page adding the counterexample)

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endgame a day ago | parent | next [-]

The talk page about the conjecture clarifies WP:RSSELF:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Sel...

> Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications.

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tptacek a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not complaining about Wikipedia here, just noting for the thread: it's a vector of polynomials. It has a nonsingular Jacobian. Provided with it are 3 distinct points it sends to the same point; it can't be invertible.

What Wikipedia says about this doesn't matter, does it?

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bonzini a day ago | parent [-]

Wikipedia does have a rule allowing "routine calculations"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

Of course given the magnitude of the statement a bit of care is warranted, but the rules do allow it.

	▲	tptacek a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think Wikipedia has very sane processes. I'm just saying that process isn't useful to this thread. It's like if I found a SHA2 collision. I'd probably have to be an absurdly talented (and lucky) cryptanalyst to do that, but anybody on the thread could trivially confirm my finding.
	▲	redsocksfan45 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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throwaway676712 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's more like WP:BASICMATH. It's like someone showing a huge number isn't prime (proverbially hard to factor, trivial to check) and HN/WP users requesting a reputable source citation for the factor multiplication when anyone can input it in a calculator.

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nullc 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Verifying that counterexample is a trivial calculation for basically anyone qualified to make substantive changes in that category of article, it shouldn't be an issue in and of itself.

Discovering the counter example is research, validating it is basic calculations.

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jibal a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

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CamperBob2 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Wikipedia's editors won't be happy until the site has joined Stack Overflow in self-owned oblivion.