Wow wow wow. Who the heck is this guy?

Ashay Dharwadker, who claimed to have proven the four color theorem in 2000.

In fact I was not searching for 4-color theorem, but an efficient algorithm for enumerating maximal cliques (guess why), which gets the 1st hit in Google! But that is really suspicious if he is getting it right.

• Firstly, the site is hosted in Geocities. That's fine, since I also had a site hosted in Geocities. But being a professional scientist his homepage (all the profiles, etc.) should not be in Geocities, right?

• The first sentence of the abstract is:

  We present a new polynomial-time algorithm for finding maximal cliques in graphs.

  Wait, what? Polynomial time? As we all know MaximalClique is an NP-hard problem, so quoting 梁柏和 either he gets the Turing Award/Fields Medal/Wolf Prize (not Nobel prize because there's no Nobel prize for math or C.S.), or he is wrong. Since his name cannot be found in these lists, he's wrong.

• The interest thing is he did have written a program for his algorithm! I haven't tried it though.

Then a navigated to his homepage and found a “New proof of the four colour theorem”. There are many citations to this page, look:

Thanks to the Canadian Mathematical Society for selecting this website as a "cool math site of the week" and knot No. 221 in their popular braid of links on October 5, 2000; Thanks to the editors of the The Math Forum at Drexel University for providing an elegant review of this website in 2000; Thanks to the editors of Tölvunot Fréttahorn at Akureyri University for writing an article about this proof in 2000; Thanks to the editors of Yahoo! for featuring this website in their list of Famous Mathematics Problems in 2002; Thanks to Jan Guichelaar and Marco Swaen for citing this proof in their article published by the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society in 2004; Thanks to Dominic Verderaime for citing this proof in his essay on the History of the Four Color Theorem in 2005; Thanks to Anita Pasotti for citing this proof in her article on the Teorema dei Quattro Colori e la Teoria dei Grafi in 2007; Thanks to Isabelle Nieuwoudt for citing this proof in her Ph.D. thesis at Stellenbosch University in 2007; This proof has also been cited in Applications of Graph Theory published by the Korean Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2007. We are pleased to announce that this proof now appears as the fourteenth chapter of the book Graph Theory published by Orient Longman and Universities Press of India in 2008.

I can't read the elegant review. And University of Akureyri has a Faculty of Business and Natural Science. In terms of citing,

• The Dutch one reads “Since 2000, there is a purely algebraic proof of Ashay Dhawadker, see sources. Experts in the field of the four color problem on this evidence have not yet pronounced. Maybe they wait until the computer for their check can.”
• The Dominic Verderaime one only has 2 references, without comments.
• The Italian (in a matematicamente.it magazine) one reads “Finally, in 2000, Ashay Dharwadker [5] propose a new demonstration of the theorem that requires the use of the theory of groups.”.
• The PhD thesis has only one sentence: “In 2000 yet another proof of the four–colour theorem was produced by Ashay Dharwadker [36]. In his proof he made use of Steiner systems (design theory)”.
• The Korean one... has a profile hosted under Dharwadker's! (The writer has another profile at his university.) And of course, this article has nothing to do with the proof itself, just the theorem (being proved by others already) is utilized.
• The book is co-authored by him.

And most importantly, there is a “Raison d'être”:

Recent research in physics shows that this proof directly implies the Grand Unification of the Standard Model with Quantum Gravity in its physical interpretation and conversely, the existence of the standard model of particle physics shows that nature applies this proof of the four colour theorem at the most fundamental level.

OH MY GOD. So that's it: A website hosting a Theory of Everything, without any peer review (even not arXiv.org), and I don't even know if he had started his PhD or not (he seems got an MSc in George Washington University, but it's not listed in the profile) (But he calls himself Prof.). Definitely a science crank.

(Technically, he proved the fine structure constant = 1/137, which we already knew is wrong.)

But this one is better in sense that

What is even worse is how he responds to critics. See this page for all: http://www.log24.com/log05/050725-Crank.html. (Although the degrees of Steven H. Cullinane is not much better than Ashay Dharwadker; but a least Steve doesn't hide his background!)