Karl Sabbagh

Karl Sabbagh is a writer and TV producer whose book The Riemann Hypothesis is just out in paperback from Farrar, Straus in the US. He is completing a history of Palestine, to be published by Atlantic.

Letter
Ferdinand Mount mentions Balfour’s forgetfulness about names (LRB, 20 March). That wasn’t the only indication of his poor memory. J.M.N. Jeffries, a Daily Mail journalist with very good sources in Whitehall, told the following story in Palestine: The Reality (1939):Once during 1919, in Paris, after an important meeting of the Council of Ten, next morning [Balfour] was shown by a secretary (my informant)...

“Louis de Branges’s paper was slipped onto the internet without a fuss. There is no evidence that, so far, any mathematician has read it: de Branges and his proof appear to have been ostracised by the profession. I have talked to a number of mathematicians about him and his work over the last few years and it seems that the profession has come to the view that nothing he does in this area will ever bear fruit and therefore his work can be safely ignored. It may be that that a possible solution to one of the most important problems in mathematics is never investigated because no one likes the solution’s author.”

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