An acknowledgement of priority

Extract

In 1963 Mathematika published a note [2[ in which I “proved” that the equation f(x₁, …, x^m) = 1 could always be solved in algebraic integers f(x₁, …, x^m), whenever f(x₁, …, x^m) was a homogeneous polynomial of degree n ≥ 1, with algebraic integers of greatest common divisor 1 as coefficients. This “proof” was so good that it had to be corrected in [3]. Since neither I nor anyone else had any use for this result, these papers dropped into the decent obscurity reserved for dead ends in mathematical research. They presumably would have remained there had not Cantor [1] recently started looking at similar results. He discovered, to his surprise and mine, that the entire article [2] had been anticipated by Skolem in a 1934 monograph ]4] which, apparently, had also languished in obscurity. The only consolation I can draw from this is the observation that, if I was unaware of Skolem's article, he was unaware of Steinitz's work [5] of 1911, which he duplicated in Theorems 5 and 6 of [4]. The moral of this story is that any working mathematician would rather prove something himself than try to find it in any but the most accessible literature.