Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Huge News... That Few Can Fathom


Shinichi Mochizuki's claim of proving the 'abc conjecture' is receiving widespread notice in the scientific press, although it may take years to confirm the highly-complex, 500-page-long finding, which according to some is currently only comprehensible to Mochizuki himself (who invented new math in the process of reaching his results)!
The conjecture is viewed as being central to number theory and the underlying relationships of prime numbers; described by some "as a sort of grand unified theory of whole numbers."
For those who wish to follow along a bit, a few more of the many Web entries that have been reporting on the claim:

http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=ABC_conjecture

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=proof-claimed-for-deep-connection-between-prime-numbers

http://bit-player.org/2012/the-abc-game

I suspect Amir Aczel ;-) or somebody may already be at work writing a book for the rest of us to understand!




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"(who invented new math in the process of reaching his results)!"

You shouldn't emphasize this like it's such a big deal. Mathematicians constantly invent new math, a math paper with no new math shouldn't even be publishable in a serious mathematical journal.

"Shecky Riemann" said...

I didn't think I "emphasized" it; it was merely a parenthetical comment... still, much of published math simply draws new connections between areas of math that are well-established but haven't been drawn together before. Mochizuki appears to have truly "invented" new math along the way, as better outlined by Alex Bellos' recent piece:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/09/abc-conjecture.html