Nigeria: What do we do this things for?

Since we are in a season of prize winners, from the Golden Eagles to young genius that won the world scrabble championship I was not surprised to read this weekend that the country got another accolade, this time in the rarefied field of Mathematics. Out of excitement and curiosity I went online to find out what our professor of mathematics really did and how the rest of the world perceived it and how they showered him and by corollary Nigeria with accolades.
I was disappointed and put on the alert when I discovered the story was only covered in Nigerian blogs and the that they were all similarly worded.


I asked Senia Sheydvasser a PhD Mathematics student at Yale University about this earth shaking development and this is what he said.

'Everything about this reeks of it being fake. To start with, the credentials attributed to Dr. Enoch are entirely implausible. I was particularly amused by the line about discovering a "scientific technique for detecting and tracking someone on an evil mission." What does that even mean? Does this techniques read thoughts to determine whether someone is planning something evil? Can this technique be used to track someone who is on a mission that is in a moral gray area? What if they aren't so much on a mission so much as they partake in the occasional recreational evil? It makes no sense.


I decided to look up the proceedings of the International Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science. Indeed, there does seem to have been a Dr. Enoch who spoke at this conference, and who talked about the spectral theory interpretation of the Riemann Hypothesis. However, the abstract does not seem to suggest that Dr. Enoch was announcing a proof of RH.


It gets worse. Surely such an important paper would have to be published somewhere? Perhaps it would be on ArXiV or elsewhere on the Internet. I decided to have a look. I can't seem to find any trace of something like "A matrix that generates the point spectral of the Riemann Zeta function", which was the title of Dr. Enoch's talk.


However, there is a paper titled "A Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis" online, uploaded by someone who claims to be Opeyemi Enoch, up on Academia.edu. If, indeed, this is Opeyemi Enoch that uploaded this paper, then he is guilty of very sloppy, very blatant plagiarism.


To start with, the paper doesn't even have his name on it! It has the name of Werner Raab, who (I checked) published a paper online in 2013 that is almost line for line identical to the one on Academia.edu.


I will admit that I didn't bother going through his paper (there are enough wrong proofs of RH on the Internet to drown in), but a quick overlook of the methods used (along with the fact that no one has heard of this paper in two years) suggests that there is a 0% chance that it could possibly be right.


So, to summarize, no, the Riemann Hypothesis has not been solved. A general note: be suspicious of any story of this significance that does not get covered by any reputable news source, particularly when they claim not that a solution has been proposed to a long-standing conjecture, but that it has been solved outright. That is sensationalist garbage---the real world does not work like that.'


Micheal Jørgensen, a PhD holder in Mathematics also said,
'There are a lot of copies of the story you cited, but no evidence to support the story.

On Academia.edu - Share research Dr. Enoch has uploaded a number of paper regarding the Riemann Hypothesis, but none with himself as author: Federal University, Oye-Ekiti - Academia.edu.'


So what exactly is this about?
The stink of the fake Philip Emeagwali is still in the air, why are we letting ourselves in for another round of international ridicule.