jimmysnyder said:
Sadly no, there's a cottage industry in trisecting the general angle. And proving the 5th postulate.
Underwood Dudley has some good books (I think three of them) on math crackpots. I met few crackpots so far, and it is usually me who suffer. There are crackpots with strange logical system so that we are unable to convince them what they are saying isn't true. There are crackpots that have knowledge to impress the majority of laymen but still have fatal flaw. These people usually tend to work very hard (albeit with knowledge comparable to a third year undergraduate) to prove something.
So there are three kinds. First kind - ones who try to prove something already known to be impossible (trisecting, contradiction to incompleteness theorem) . Second kind - ones who try to prove something that hasn't been proven yet (Riemann, Goldbach). Third kind - ones who try to find some ridiculously simple proof for result already established (Fermat, Four Colour).
Some physicists tend to think math is more "immune" to crackpots, this isn't true. Even with the first kind, it is impossible to prove people wrong, because people who judge whether it is right or wrong - usually don't know. And those of us who know already don't need to be told.
I am familiar with one country where a crackpot professor (YES, PhD with tenure) came on TV to say that he has proven P/NP to be false and to say that this validates existence of ghosts. (really!) Article about him appears on newspaper roughly every year, whenever he feels he's ready to talk to some reporters. And reporters think their country has finally found a brilliant mathematician. And some actually treat this seriously. So far I haven't seen some report disputing this.
In the same country, there's a famous crackpot who owns like 30 websites. He spends his day googling his name and when his name pops up he will post in that website, send e-mails, or whatever. He says that Wiles's proof of Fermat is worthless, because he proved it in 30 lines using middle school mathematics. And he will work for hours so that he can post it in every website possible. (He also has much easier proof of four colour theorem) I got to talk to him, and he said he submitted his article on four colour to Elsevier. I told him that's not a journal but a company. He didn't know the difference. He also submitted that Fermat paper (?) to journal owned by the country's mathematical society. The society, of course, without going to a referee rejected the paper. Then he stood in front of the office with pickets, protesting. And he has posted legal threats and whatsoever on various websites. Many mathematicians (not two or five, but hundreds) in this country tried to meet him in person and explain or e-mail him, but they all have failed. Next time when the society received his paper (the same paper), they forwarded it to a referee, apparently. I don't know what happened after that.
Getting a headstart on the funniest PF member this year.