Footnotes:
Kalimuthu Sennimalai - Crackpot or Joker?
Kalimuthu Sennimalai is either a true crackpot or a joker intent on getting as much complete nonsense published in journals as possible. As well as claiming in PDF The Hindu Holistic solution for carbon removal and maintaining a good climate and environment that: “A non-stop chanting of the above mentioned Holy sounds/mantras will definitely remove carbon, create good climate condition and keep the TOTAL ENVIRONMENT free from all the natural threats…” and other similar material (see Google scholar for Kalimuthu Sennimalai), he has also published a paper in which he claims that he has eight different ways of proving Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. (Footnote: Kalimuthu Sennimalai, “Eight Different Proofs for Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems”, Social Science Research Network (SSRN) 4333703 (2023).) It is worth having a quick look at it if only for the entertainment value, it is quite hilarious. His first such “proof ” is by “proving” Euclid’s fifth postulate (the parallel postulate); he claims to achieve this by “proving” that the angles of every triangle summate to the same value. He starts off with an image of a triangle divided into three triangles:
Figure: Triangle divided into three
Then he states that:
e is the sum of the angles of the left triangle ABD,
s is the sum of the angles of the middle triangle ADE,
w is the sum of the angles of the right triangle AEC, and
g is the sum of the angles of the overall triangle ABC.
He then states that given that k, n, o and r are positive real values, he declares that
(1) e + w = k + n
(2) e + g = k + o
(3) s + g = k + r
He then goes through a series of manipulations of equations and arrives at his equation (7):
g2 - (k + o)g - e2 + e(k + o) = 0
and from this, by the use of the standard quadratic formula for g he gets the result that g = e, and so he asserts that given two arbitrary triangles for which he asserts that his initial assumption was that the sum of their angles was not necessarily identical, he has proved that they must be identical.
But that equation (7) is not a true quadratic where the parameters of the equation are independent of the variable g of the quadratic, since by the initial equation (2) we have that k + o = e + g, so that the equation is in reality:
g2 - (e + g)g - e2 + e(e +g) = 0
which reduces to:
g2 - eg - g2 - e2 + e2 + eg = 0
where everything cancels out, which means that the left side = the right side = 0, regardless of the values of g and e; the g and e could be any values and the left side will always equal the right side value of zero. In other words, all the equations and manipulations prove absolutely nothing except the absurdity of the “proof ”.
And no, I didn’t bother reading Kalimuthu’s other 7 “proofs of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem” which appear to be all similar claims of proofs of Euclid’s parallel postulate. He is clearly the epitome either of a crackpot - or a joker.
For an analysis of another crackpot, see How to tell if someone is a crackpot, which looks at the claims of a John Gabriel.
Other Posts
Rationale: Every logical argument must be defined in some language, and every language has limitations. Attempting to construct a logical argument while ignoring how the limitations of language might affect that argument is a bizarre approach. The correct acknowledgment of the interactions of logic and language explains almost all of the paradoxes, and resolves almost all of the contradictions, conundrums, and contentious issues in modern philosophy and mathematics.
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