Atiyah

Sir Michael Atiyah came out of left field and made sensational claims (proved the Riemann hypothesis, calculated the fine-structure constant) more characteristic of a vixra physicist. And indeed, his Riemann preprint has been uploaded to vixra, though I don't know if it came from him.

I started a forum thread on the physics of his claims. I have not succeeded in properly deciphering his procedure to produce the value of 1/α. The integer part is Eddington meets Bott, but no-one has been able to motivate the next few digits.

But one interesting thing came up in that thread. Atiyah speaks of an iterated process that he calls renormalization, and "Auto-Didact" remarked that it resembles something out of bifurcation theory. And as I have posted here previously, 1/α is approximately equal to 2π times the square of Feigenbaum's constant.

So if - against the odds - there is anything to Atiyah's baroque conceptions, I think it would involve the Feigenbaum connection. But for now, I expect nothing. It was stimulating, it stirred things up, but I think it's a blind alley.