Mohamed El Naschie
Mohamed El Naschie (Arabic: محمد النشائي) is an Egyptian engineer and the former editor of a controversial journal, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. The controversy concerned El Naschie's publication, over many years, of over 300 papers of questioned scientific merit authored by himself in his own journal with little or no apparent peer review. Published reports of his eventual departure from the editorship of the journal led to a lengthy libel court case that raised questions about the libel laws in Great Britain. The controversy has also played a role in discussions of the "impact factor" as a quality measure for scientific journals, and of the methodology of university rankings.
El Naschie grew up in Germany. His initial training was as an engineer, obtaining an engineering degree from the University of Hanover. He later studied in England and was awarded a doctorate by the University of London in 1974, with a thesis entitled "The roll of formulation in elastic buckling" [sic].
Between 1974 and 1990 El Naschie published eight papers, mostly relating to the mathematics of buckling, in the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics. Since then he has published over 400 articles, mostly in the field of theoretical physics, the majority in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, a journal of which he was the editor-in-chief, and where standards of peer review have been questioned.
The majority of El Naschie's later publications concern his own, controversial, E-infinity theory, that the universe has an infinite number of dimensions and is based on a Cantor continuum. Mathematical physicist professor John C. Baez of the University of California, Riverside has called El Naschie's work "undisciplined numerology filled with impressive buzzwords", while cosmologist Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute, testifying as an expert witness against El Naschie in a British court case, has strongly criticized the quality of El Naschie's papers, based on criteria such as the occurrence of meaningless or obscure statements, statements that are wrong, and the lack of any substantial contribution of new knowledge to the field concerned. In 2002, El Naschie was awarded a Fellowship by the Frankfurter Förderverein für Physikalische Grundlagenforschung, a private organisation devoted to supporting research, in appreciation of his "original ideas in developing a theory of fractal space-time allowing the determination of the basic constants of nature".
...
Wikipedia