Voigt emphasized to HuffPost that Ray was deserving of the research award he received, and that the student's work should be appreciated from the perspective that he is a 16-year-old high school student using a kind of mathematics far beyond high-school level.
That said, Ray’s alleged solutions were “not endorsed by experts in the field who should have been involved in the evaluation of the work,” Voigt and Chill wrote in their published comments on the young man’s work. Furthermore, his steps were largely already known to experts.
Voigt said he did not know how the public was made to believe that a long-standing problem had been solved.
“The point is not that something is missing in Ray’s analysis, but rather that there was no ‘problem posed by Newton,’ and that the methods used by Ray are exceptional and remarkable for a high-school student, but standard for professional mathematicians,” Voigt said.
