I got brought into the Hugoniot group to continue research that a girl Morgana Martin had started. She got a PhD and left the group but the grant she was working on still had a lot of money left on it. My advisor had me read one of her papers, and she had solved those two equations in it. She did it, and it passed peer-review, and after she graduated she got some high-powered national lab job somewhere I think. Not only was so she stupid to think that she ought to fudge what she wrote int he paper, she didn't even realize that the entire area of study in materials science related to the Hugoniot relations is that you can't solve these two equations.
She write this paper probably around 2010 or 2011 and it's in the literature now. Here's what i want to emphasize: she wrote this paper at the end of her PhD, just before she finished. Even after working on the problem for five years, she did not realize that the whole point of everything we were doing in that group was to fill in the gaps about how it was impossible to solve this equation. It was the big vexing problem overarching everything, but then when she needed to solve the equations because she was working on it, somehow she was able to do it! So, more important that doing science, she wanted to tell her advisor, "Look! I did it," instead of, "This is impossible." This is particular because I had noticed in about 5 weeks that the whole thing in our area of study revolves around these two equations in three variables being impossible to solve, but she did not notice in five years. I think the advisor gave me the paper because he wanted to see if I would noticed that she was full of shit. I certainly did, but the peer-reviewer who let her publish certainly did not. Now she's a hot-shot federal scientist. All she has going for her is that she's a woman. That ought to be seen as an adverse trait for scientific work, but actually it is sufficient by itself alone.
