Skip to main content

Give Gabriel Oyibo a Break

November 16, 2010

  I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong  . . . [Ecclesiastes 9:11].

  I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong  . . . [Ecclesiastes 9:11].

Farooq Kperogi recently wrote a piece on “Intellectual 419” in which he castigated both Philip Emeagwali and Gabriel Oyibo as 419 scam artists. Putting both Oyibo and Emeagwali in the same 419 pot and dumping them both in the sewer is, I think, regrettable. As a matter of fact, Dr. Oyibo has actually put his intellectual thought into concrete form. There is a reasonably voluminous and sufficiently dense body of work by him in the public domain that anyone may examine. But people don't usually comment on his mathematical equations; rather, they comment on his non-mathematical "rantings."

I haven't seen Professor Oyibo lately, but credible people say he does cut a pathetic figure nowadays. If that is the case, then perhaps the time has come to limit his appearance in public, in much the same way that one would not now allow the great Muhammad Ali to step into the boxing ring and make a public exhibition of his boxing skills in his present condition. It must have been for good reason that President Ronald Reagan was enveloped in a private bubble of tender care by his loving wife toward the end of his life. Things happen as people get older.

But I want to comment on this charge of intellectual 419. If Oyibo is scamming with mathematics, then it should be fairly easy to point out which of his published equations is a scam. As it is normally done in engineering mathematics, Oyibo's equations are numbered for easy citation and referencing.

Sometimes, a mathematician makes an honest mistake and is not engaged in any 419. If that is the case it should, again, be fairly easy to show where the error is merely by pointing out the mistake in the work.

It happened to our venerable Chike Obi the other day. Most of us grew up in Nigeria idolizing the great man. So, like others, I was elated beyond measure when, in his golden years, Professor Chike Obi decided to tackle the problem of “Fermat's Last Theorem” (using only methods known at the time of Fermat) instead of joining the latter-day pack of politicians to loot and ruin Nigeria. After all, he was a politician of note in the early days of the Republic, and he could well have joined the present band to enrich himself at the expense of our country. Yet, he pursued intellectual rigor rather than filthy lucre. Sadly, an error was reported in Chike Obi's paper by Dr. Frits Beukers of the Netherlands. He simply pointed out where the error was in the paper and that was the end of the story. Nobody called anybody names.

In the opinion of some people in cyberspace, Gabriel Oyibo is “crazy.” I haven't seen the man lately. The last time I saw Dr. Oyibo, he was in the professional company of mathematicians, physicists and engineers; he did not appear crazy to me. But I am not a Board Certified Psychiatrist, so I cannot tell if whatever they claim ails Dr. Oyibo may be found in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Perhaps this charge of craziness is just a matter of hyperbolic speech, or in the sense that some people say that Grigoriy Perelman of St. Petersburg, Russia, is crazy. You see, Dr. Perelman turned down a million dollar pot of money earlier this year, money that was awarded to him by the Clay Mathematics Institute for resolving the long-standing Poincare conjecture in Mathematics.

Sometimes, a genius here and there is truly crazy. Like Nash, John F. Nash. The same John Nash for whom “Nash equilibrium” is named. Even though he was certified crazy and even confined to a mental hospital for a while around 1959, he was still given the “Nobel” Prize for Economics in 1994. And a movie, “A Beautiful Mind,” was made of his life in 2001. It takes time. It takes time to move from certified mad man to Nobel Laureate.

In an attempt to lock up Gabriel Oyibo in a 419 dungeon, our brother, Farooq Kperogi, faulted the Lagos Guardian and their stringer or correspondent, Laolu Akande. Here is an excerpt from Farooq's report: “[The Nobel Committee] said it was impossible for anybody to know if he was a nominee for any Prize until several decades after the fact.” Well, it is not impossible.

Farooq also asked, “How in the world did Oyibo and the Guardian's Laolu Akande know that Oyibo was a nominee for the Physics Prize?” Well, leaks happen in journalism.

Dear reader, let us do a simple exercise in word substitution. Replace the Guardian with the New York Times, interchange reporter “Laolu Akande” with “John F. Burns,” swap the “Physics Prize” for the “Peace Prize,” and re-frame Farooq's question as follows: “How in the world did Arthur Clarke and the New York Times' John F. Burns know that Clarke was a nominee for the Peace Prize [in 1994]?"

The answer to the question may be found in the New York Times of November 28, 1994, where the highly regarded John Burns wrote as follows.

    Mr. Clarke was nominated this year for a Nobel Peace Prize, something even he thought might be an award too far. The nominator, Glenn Harlan Roberts [actually, Reynolds, not Roberts], a University of Tennessee law professor, noted that Mr. Clarke is more than a science-fiction writer. Among other things, it said, he is recognized, from a 1945 article for Wireless World, as the intellectual father of the fixed-position communications satellites that ushered in a new telecommunications era.

The whole world knew in 1994, not fifty years later, the same way Arthur Clarke himself knew in 1994, not several decades later, that he was a nominee for a Nobel Prize: through a leak.

How does one prove that nobody ever leaked to Gabriel Oyibo that he was being nominated?

I frankly don't know for a fact if the Nobel Committee did or did not receive a nomination of Dr. Oyibo for any Prize. Most of us are not in a position to know. Those who know authoritatively won't speak; and those who claim to speak authoritatively don't really know.

In a way, Gabriel Oyibo's saga reminds me of the French mathematician, Rene Thom. While Thom was doing mainstream mathematics, he was celebrated by his peers. In 1958, he even won the Fields Medal, the defacto “Nobel” Prize in Mathematics. But when, after discovering the power of singularities of smooth mappings, he (or his associates) went further to speculate on their application for predicting things like stock market crashes, prison riots, and so on, his reputation took a severe beating. Mind you, it was not the mathematics that was wrong, it was the speculation. The Russian mathematician V. I. Arnold dumped the speculation and focused on the mathematics of Thom's theorem, expanding it from real to complex singularities, and elevating it to glorious heights.

Oyibo's exploits using various mathematical transformation techniques to convert difficult problems in aeroelasticity to simpler ones amenable to closed-form solutions were accepted in the mainstream by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) back in the early 1980s. What Oyibo published in the prestigious AIAA Journal and other peer-reviewed outlets between 1983 and 1990 alone is sufficient to earn him tenure. Did someone say he didn't get tenure? At least he got a job.

He got a job as a Professor after getting his PhD. There are some 5,000 Americans who can't get jobs after finishing their PhD or other doctorates or professional degrees. They end up working as janitors, according to Richard Vedder, citing data from the Government's Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the October 20, 2010, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. An American janitor with PhD. No job, no tenure.

Sometimes in life, the race is not to the swift. Nor yet riches to men of understanding. Time and chance happen to them all. So said the Preacher.

More recently, however, I must confess that Gabriel has lost me when I hear about his cosmological speculation, on Atum or Atom, and so on. But I still admire his work on the vibrations of plates and shells, aeroelasticity, mathematical fluid dynamics and, above all, his mastery and usage of various transformation techniques, from hodographs to group-theoretic invariance theorems. Right now, Oyibo should be spending half his time per year in Nigeria, training the next generation of PhD students, and should not be reduced to making incoherent appearances on you-tube just to eke out a living, as some have suggested. He could be a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at ABU, or of Applied Mathematics at UI, or of Theoretical Physics at Nsukka.

Oyibo's knowledge is not only deep and sound on specific subjects, it is also unusually wide in scope. I won't pretend to understand his work on relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, etc. I am only an Imperial College trained engineer, who has had a stint at MIT, spent time at NASA, and taught engineering at Purdue for two decades. So, I don't do physics! But the veritable Professor Alex Animalu, Past-President of the Nigerian Academy of Science, has checked some of Oyibo's work in theoretical physics and declared it sound. It is only fair that Dr. Oyibo, who has done a lot of work in engineering, physics and mathematics, should not be dismissed as crazy, or condemned as a crook and con-artist, without a through evaluation of his written work which is publicly available to anyone.

Concerning Oyibo's speculations in primordial cosmology, it is pertinent to recall that Sir Isaac Newton also speculated in eschathological theology. But most people remember Newton more for his work in mechanics and optics, than his commentary on the Biblical book of Daniel.

Albert Einstein was also ridiculed back in 1905. Lucky for him, he had Sir Arthur Eddington in his corner. But who will be Oyibo's Eddington? It wasn't until 1925 that Einstein was given the Nobel Prize, whereupon he was universally promoted from “crank” to “genius.” Twenty years, from 1905 to 1925.

Sometimes it takes up to twenty years or more to recognize a diamond that is mistakenly dumped in a 419 sewer. I remember when the Madiba, Nelson Mandela, was mistakenly and unjustly cast in the “terrorist” mold. But with time on his side, he ended up with the Nobel Prize—for Peace! Of course, Oyibo is no Mandela, but my hope is that time is on his side.

I recognize that we do have a duty to police ourselves, and to expose fraud. But let's be sure 419 is really 419. And, if you do find an error in any of Dr. Oyibo's mathematical papers, please let me know, and I will gather people to investigate whether or not such errors may be corrected. I myself have found a few typos here and there; the editing of some of his books leaves much to be desired.

But what if Oyibo is mostly right, or partially right? What if the person the mob is jumping upon has actually worked very hard to solve very tough problems, but the rest of us are either too lazy to read what he has written, or not competent enough to assess his labor?

How about separating his mathematics from his theological speculation, his sound and rational logic from his “madness”, the wheat from the chaff? Wasn't Nash mad? Didn't Newton speculate on end-times? How about not throwing the baby out with the bath water, or not throwing one of our own under the bus? If he wasn't “mad” before, won't he be “mad” now that even his own people are the ones tearing up his reputation without even reading his work?

In as much as we can, let us edify rather than crucify one another. Give Oyibo a break.
 

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });