Question

Neil Calkin deletes previous tweet, labels news of a short proof of the four-color theorem as “premature”

Answer 1

Fair play for explaining a redaction. Many would have just left it at that.

Answer 2

One thing people seem to be getting wrong: Neil Calkin never claimed a proof. He was stating two other mathematicians, David Jackson and Bruce Richmond, claimed a proof. More pedantically, David Jackson claimed the two of them had a proof.

Answer 3

If you really think you've cracked something then the excitement can be quite overwhelming, and leaves one liable to do things like post tweets before a really thorough amount of checking has been done. Absolutely fair play for the deletion, totally natural and human to post the tweet the first place. No hard feelings.

Answer 4

If it looks too good to be true, it often is.

Answer 5

Meh. I jad so much hoped for a new shorter proof of this. And specifically, a proof which wasnt brute forced.

Even though I didn't really believe he had one.

Answer 6

Boy, sure didn't see that coming

Answer 7

I think the takeaway from this is that one must be careful about sharing their excitement with those with a Twitter account.

Answer 8

The original announcement wasn't about a new theorem, just a new proof, and it was entirely possible he had one. Real nice of him to withdraw and tweet it.

New proofs of old theorems, including significantly simplified ones aren't unheard of.  Selberg-Erdos' elementary proof of the prime number theorem is a famous one.  A lesser known example is a one paragraph proof by the then-high-schooler Noah Snyder of Mason's theorem, which is the functional variant of the ABC conjecture!

Answer 9

There's no better way to find an error than to share your result with everyone. Luckily he found it at an intermediate stage.

Answer 10

Speedrun gone wrong.