[FOM] Arithmetical soundness of ZFC

William Messing messi001 at umn.edu
Thu May 28 10:03:57 EDT 2009


Andrew Odlyzko is a colleague of mine at the University of Minnesota and 
I have known him since I taught a graduate course on Class Field Theory 
in the early 1970's at MIT.  I have never discussed with him whether he 
believes RH to be true or false.  The  quoted statements from 
Derbyshire's book. lead me to surmise that Odlyzko does not believe that 
RH is independent of the axioms of ZFC.

Concerning what Gelfand said, as I reported in my last post, he 
certainly gave no indication that he thought RH was independent or that 
he was trying to prove that it was.  He was simply raising it as a 
possibility that could not be dismissed out of hand.

William Messing


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