Retracted: New Riesz representations of linear maps associated with certain boundary value problems and their applications (Q1678079): Difference between revisions

This (together with its companion paper [\textit{Y.~Tan} et al., J. Inequal. Appl. 2017, Paper No. 250, 9 p. (2017; Zbl 1401.46027)]) is one of the most unusual papers I have ever read, only outperformed by those infamous nonsense papers written by text generating software like mathgen. Both these papers have the following format: There is a title, abstract and introduction; then there is a section with preliminaries and one with main results; further there is a section called ``Numerical simulations'' and finally one called ``Conclusions''. What strikes me, and what makes these papers look extremely dubious, is that there is no relation whatsoever between the title/introduction and the main results, there is no relation between either of the two and the numerical simulations, and there is no relation between either of the three and the conclusions. The introduction appears to be a random concatenation of phrases concerning Schwartz distributions, potential theory and other fields mentioning for instance work by ``the second author and Weizsäcker'' (there is no such joint work). No mention is made of the eponymous Riesz representation of linear maps. The main results are practically identical in both papers under review apart from the choice of one parameter, and they are marred by loads of typos that make them difficult to understand. Also the numerical simulations are identical to the letter and to the fourth decimal in both papers. Allegedly, they support Theorem~3.1 and~3.2, but these results deal with the possibility to define the product of certain Schwartz distributions, nothing that warrants numerical simulations. Finally, the conclusions are identical in both papers (``we obtained the representation of continuous linear maps in the set of all closed bounded convex nonempty subsets of any Banach space''), which is striking in itself, but on top of that this conclusion is mathematically nonsensical (what is ``linear maps in the set of all closed bounded convex nonempty subsets''?) and, as I have already mentioned, the papers come nowhere near any Riesz representation theorem. At the time of this writing (December 2018) nine months have passed since zbMATH informed the Editor-in-Chief of the journal about these problematic papers, but no retraction is in sight. If this was a sting operation probing the peer-reviewing quality of the journal, it was a successful one.