Florentin Smarandache was born in Romania, on December 10, 1954. He fled Romania in 1988, leaving behind his son and pregnant wife; after two years in refugee camps in Turkey, he immigrated to the United States in 1990. He obtained a doctorate degree in mathematics from the Moldova State University and is currently an associate professor at the University of New Mexico-Gallup (a community college). Smarandache is best known for a wide Internet self-publicity stunt carried out in recent years, by allegedly polluting many internet resources (such as message boards, science groups, Wikipedia and even right here in Planetmath) with his own writings, sometimes under his own name and, supposedly, many times under the name of others (Carol Harlestle, Charles T. Le, George Gregory, David Singh, etc) who seem to evangelize Smarandache's ideas (see the discussion on his multiple identities). For example, here is one interesting excerpt from Google groups (sci.logic):

Hello from India! I read about paradoxes in this logic forum, and I got a paper, here in Delhi, edited by M.L.Perez, called ``Smarandache Linguistic Tautologies'', in `Bulletin of Pure and Applied Sciences', Vol. 18E (No. 1), pp. 83-87, 1999. I scanned it for you below. Don't take them for puzzles, but for deeper senses. Many examples are funny, comic - smarandachian style!

Even though the person posting the message claims to be writing from India, the message reveals the IP address 64.106.24.53, which belongs to UNM-Gallup, the employer of Smarandache at the time. The rest of the message (available here) is also a somewhat illustrative example of the depth of the contributions by Smarandache. Here are some of the so called Smarandachian tautologies: ``This is not a teacher, this is a professor. This is not a car, this is a Wolswagen [sic]. This is not a truck, this is a Chevy. This is not noise, this is music. This is not music, this is noise.''

Perhaps the most contentious issue surrounding Smarandache is the fact that he has named a vast number of concepts after himself. Of course, in all of science and particularly in mathematics, naming an object or discovery after one-self is extremely frowned upon, for it is clearly an egomaniacal, pompous and vainglorious sign. Furthermore, the notions that he names after himself are perceived by the mathematical community as quite useless definitions, lacking any motivation and of no mathematical interest whatsoever (see smarandacheials or the generalized smarandache palindrome). In other cases, he has claimed authorship of results which are trivial corollaries of well-known theorems (see generalization of Euler-Fermat theorem, its attached proof, this thread and this thread).

Smarandache has also created several journals for the self-promotion of his ideas, such as the Smarandache Notions Journal, Progress in Physics or the publisher Hexis. In other occasions, his papers have appeared in journals with little or no peer-review, and some whose actual existence is dubious (such as the Octogon Math. Mag.). Smarandache's publications have been constantly rejected from established journals. In online resources such as the ArXiv his articles get automatically transfered to the GM (General Mathematics) section which, as some people guess, it seems GM stands for `Garbage Machine'. Smarandache has claimed that this is due to the ``existence of a mafia in science''. However, the decision of the ArXiv seems hard to argue given the quality of Smarandache's contributions. As an example, see ``Funny Problems!''. Here is an excerpt:

4) How $70 > 3$ = LOVE?
Solution: Move the characters of $70 > 3$ around.

5) $10 - 1 = 0$
Solution: If you have a stick (1) and an egg (0) and you give away the stick (1) you still have the egg (0) left.

6) All monkeys east [sic] bananas. I eat bananas. Therefore, I am a monkey!

For some further reading about the controversy, see the discussion page on his Wikipedia bio (which, incidentally, was originally created from a UNM-Gallup ip address, the employer of Smarandache) or the discussion on whether his Wikipedia bio should or should not be deleted. The result of the latter discussion was to keep the article. Some claimed ``Please in the name of all that is good let's not reward sockpuppetry and self-promotion with a Wikipedia article'' and others said ``Keep it. Notable doofus'', while others said ``A search of Amazon.com for Smarandache comes up with 182 books, many of them not written by him. When you can get a dozen authors to write books with your name in the title, you're notable'', however the reply to this was that most of the books appeared in self-published format or by ``vanity publishers''.