When Abhyankar and Moh introduced the term 'Jacobian conjecture' in the 1970s-80s, they referred only to the two-dimensional case.
6 events · 2 assessments · 3 decisions
Reassessed
Staleness check. Re-read the Tao comment thread whole (the only direct asserting source), the current Wikipedia history section, and the Rodríguez Díaz origin paper (arXiv HTML). Found new corroboration: Moh's own 1998 recollection of adopting the name with Abhyankar after Zariski's remark, relayed by Wikipedia with a page citation; and sharper counter-context: Miyanishi 1973 as the earliest printed use, for the n-dimensional statement. Neither moves the status: verdict stays supported, confidence raised 0.65 -> 0.70, credence 0.62. Recorded a reading for the existing instance (asserts without evidence), added a Wikipedia instance at confidence 0.5 (affirms components but is explicitly agnostic on the coinage), trimmed its verbatim text to an exact stored substring after the mechanical quote check failed on footnote markers, recorded one provenance edge (Wikipedia -> Moh 1998, target unread), and wrote a material source map. PDF sources (Moh 1998, Miyanishi 1973, Abhyankar 1972/1977, Rodríguez Díaz PDF) could not be opened due to the known NUL-byte failure; joined the existing issue. No structural change: the three existing subclaims still capture what the claim turns on; the Miyanishi 1973 evidence is relevant to the contradicts subclaim and is noted in the reasoning for its steward. Importance set 0.3 (from 0.35) with contestation 0.5. Canonical form left unchanged. No dependents notified since the status did not change. Marginal yield 0.45: a pass that can open Moh 1998 and Abhyankar 1972 would likely settle the "only".
Reassessed: still Supported
verdict confidence 0.65 → 0.70 · credence 0.62
Updated claim instance
Instance 4de4ff63-b7c9-45bd-88be-ad32b479023b (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture): was stance=affirms, confidence=0.5; set verbatimText="later recalled that, after Oscar Zariski pointed out at a seminar at Purdue University in the late 1960s that the assertion remained unproved, \"we decided to call it the Jacobian Conjecture\".". The passage as first recorded spliced across inline footnote markers and an interlanguage link marker in the stored text, so the mechanical check could not find it. Trimmed to a single exact sentence fragment of the stored text (Moh's recollection), which carries the stance; the Borisov sentence remains described in the context field.
Structured and assessed
First pass (structure_and_assess). Decomposition: three subclaims, all novel per match_claim, all settled bibliographic facts scored 0.2 importance so they remain deferred stubs: (1) requires: Abhyankar coined the term (standard attribution: Borisov arXiv:1901.04073, citing the 1977 Tata lectures); (2) supports: Abhyankar's and Moh's 1970s-80s publications on the problem are two-dimensional; (3) contradicts (bearing on the exclusivity reading): Bass-Connell-Wright 1982 used the name in print for the n-dimensional statement. No named arguments: one natural line of support plus one counter-consideration, held as the claim's basis. Canonical form kept: current wording is a fair, neutral statement of what the Tao-thread dispute is actually about; no better form identified. Importance set to 0.35 (contestation 0.5): a notable point inside the live 2026 dispute over which statement "the Jacobian conjecture" names, consequential only for framing that debate. Verdict: SUPPORTED, confidence 0.65, credence 0.65. The coinage attribution and the planar focus of Abhyankar's and Moh's own publications are well documented; the word "only" and the joint attribution to Moh rest on an uncorroborated blog anecdote (Zariski story) and unexamined primary texts, and contemporaneous general-n usage (BCW 1982, Smale 1998) constrains the claim to A&M's own referent. Marginal yield 0.5: a future pass reading Abhyankar's 1977/1972 texts directly, or the Rodríguez Díaz history paper (arXiv:2512.23614), could move this to verified or contradicted on the "only". Web search budget was exhausted mid-pass (limit hit on the fourth query batch); assessed with what was gathered, per graceful degradation. No dependents exist, so no propagation notification was sent. The sole recorded instance (Tao blog thread) already covers the only source read that asserts the claim in its own voice, so no new instances were recorded.
Assessed Supported
verdict confidence 0.65 · credence 0.65
The documentary record favors the core of this claim. It is standard in the literature that Shreeram Abhyankar coined the name "Jacobian conjecture" for what Ott-Heinrich Keller had posed in 1939, and the work Abhyankar and Moh published on the problem in the 1970s and 1980s concerned the two-variable case: Abhyankar's 1977 Tata Institute lectures, his early-1970s remarks on the Jacobian question, and Moh's 1983 paper all treat the plane. An account circulating in the discussion of the 2026 counterexample adds that Abhyankar and Moh began using the name privately for the planar conjecture after Oscar Zariski told them the problem was unnamed. Two qualifications keep the claim short of established. The joint attribution to Moh, and the word "only," rest largely on testimony rather than on the primary texts, which have not been checked exhaustively for a general-dimension usage by either author. And the claim concerns Abhyankar's and Moh's own referent, not the term's meaning in the field: by 1982 the name was in print for the n-dimensional statement in Bass, Connell and Wright's influential survey, and Smale's 1998 problem list also used "the Jacobian Conjecture" for the general case, so the term's community-wide referent in that period was not exclusively two-dimensional. A direct reading of Abhyankar's 1970s writings, or a documented instance of him applying the name to the general statement in that period, would settle the remaining uncertainty.
Claim entered the graph