Mathematician David Ross (Hawaii) writes:

I've not been following this closely, but I think there is some outsider confusion here.

There is a little game that mathematicians sometimes play, in which we pursue a mathematical problem or argument for its own sake but say that it is "motivated by a question in X", where X is some real-world field.  The subject matter however is the mathematics, not the field.

This is common in the areas of math in which Hill is an expert.  For example, in fair division theory the well-known "Problem of the Nile" is about setting regional borders so that the regions get flooded equally when the Nile overflows.  Nobody really expects this to be a model for taking political action in the Middle East, but it is an interesting problem mathematically.

I haven't read the original paper, but from discussions this seems to be the game Hill wanted to play, though it also seems the authors were encouraged to beef up the connection to the putative real applications.  Criticizing the paper on the veracity of the application would be a little like criticizing Nelson Goodman because the grue/bleen distinction is not an accurate model of color perception.

That said, the concern that the paper could be interpreted as support for a political position has been validated by how the story has been picked up and spread.

The Intelligencer is not really a mathematical research journal, it is a recreational magazine for mathematicians, and is a not-unreasonable place to try to publish such an article.  I think Wilkinson's suggestion, that a discussion be attached to the paper, was not a bad one; that would have been an appropriate place for people to emphasize the problems with the "applications" part of the paper.  The decision to then publish in the NYJM, whose scope is generally other areas of mathematics, does seem odd to me.