> > Mueckenheim is also cited as an authority on infinity at this > educational site: > > http://www.learner.org/courses/mathilluminated/units/3/resources/index.php > > I didn't see any evidence that WM's horrid arguments actually > influenced the text of the site. Nonetheless, students who want to > learn more about Cantor are directed to WM's illogical blatherings.
Did you consider writing to a person on the advisory board http://www.learner.org/courses/mathilluminated/about/advisors.php about this? That might have more effect than another round of discussion with Mueckenheim in this group (but there could be an exercise in the main text asking to explain why those papers are scrap)
> Still, I blame most WM's employer for putting him in a position of > authority to educate students on exactly that material he has shown no > capacity to understand. I can't comprehend how that situation has > remained. I'm sure that WM is tenured, but that doesn't entail that > he can teach bad mathematical reasoning in the classroom, does it?
That is a school for engineers and the like, not for science or mathematics majors. Mueckenheim obviously came there as a physicist, and what he does is to teach physics and mathematics to engineering students. I recently had a short look into his textbook, and while the preface is kind of crazy, the body of the book makes the impression of being fairly standard, on a first sight.
Moreover, the students at that school seem to be obliged to take some courses of a general interst nature which they can select according to personal preference, and Mueckenheim's lecture on the "history of the infinite" is among these courses.
As it is a state school one could send a formal complaint ("Dienstaufsichtsbeschwerde") to that school or the ministry responsible for the state school system, of course in German language, and they would have to answer it. If Mueckenheim gets to know this then he will blather around that he had been denounced like Zermelo who had been driven out of Freiburg university because he didn't perform the "Hitler greeting" well enough.
A couple of years ago I stumbled in a public library across this book http://www.amazon.de/Götzen-Computer-Kritik-unreinen-Vernunft/dp/3879592942/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243715629&sr=1-7 "Gödel, Götzen und Computer", by Max Woitschach. The author was primarily working for the german branch of IBM, and as a secondary job he lectured at a school like Mueckenheim's. And that book contained his collected misunderstandings (different from Mueckenheim's) about mathematics. So Mueckenheim has predecessors. Woitschach deceased in 1993, and now there is an endowment for "ideology-free science" with an annual award, see http://www.woitschach-stiftung.de/
