Idriss Aberkane

Idriss Jamil Aberkane (born May 23, 1986) is a French public speaker and essayist. Known for his writings and lectures on personal development, he published a particularly successful essay in 2016, titled Free up your mind!. However, he has been accused of artificially inflating his resume, plagiarizing portions of one of this theses, and of using his three doctoral diplomas (Ph.Ds) to talk about sciences that are not in his areas of expertise, including claiming to be a "doctor of neuroscience" and "teacher-researcher". The scientific accuracy of some of his statements and publications was questioned by other researchers. His support for embattled French epidemiologist Didier Raoult, and his questioning of the reliability of COVID-19 vaccines, in particular Pfizer's, has caused him to be classified as an anti-vax conspiracist.

Early life and education
Aberkane's parents taught mathematics at a teachers' college, and as a boy he participated in the Muslim Scouts of France, of which his father was one of the first leaders; he has cited his participation in the scouts as an inspiration for his life's work.

Aberkane has obtained three doctorate degrees: one in management science from Paris Saclay, one in comparative literature from University of Strasbourg, and one in diplomacy from Centre d'Études Diplomatiques et Stratégiques. University officials have since requested revocation of his management science PhD due to extensive plagiarism. His degree in diplomacy is not recognized by France. He became known in France for his lectures and essays about neurosciences, social psychology, gamification and their applications in education and business. A profile in the French newspaper Le Monde described his advocacy for these applications as "a bit North American, where science, popularization, morality, personal narrative and advice intertwine".

Criticisms
Aberkane has been criticized for his lack of rigor and fabricating some parts of his resume. He has since published a copy of all his diplomas (including his three doctoral diplomas) on his personal website.

For social psychology and neurosciences researcher Sebastian Dieguez, Free up your Mind is "an uninterrupted succession of isolated facts, of pointless detours, anecdotes and personal opinions, elementary mistakes, debunked "theories", truisms, hyperboles and aphorisms, which do not make for good science education."

Aberkane claims to have solved the Collatz conjecture, but mathematicians who have studied his papers strongly disagree, pointing to major mistakes in the works and noting they were published in "predatory journals" by MDPI. Discussing Aberkane's works, Fabien Durand, a professor of mathematics at Université de Picardie Jules-Verne and the president of the French Mathematical Society, considers that he made several mistakes and that "most of the proofs are at the level of a high-school or first-year college student".