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As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory, and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades.
Known as the Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI), the conjecture originated in the 1950s, was posed in its most elegant form in 1972 and has held mathematicians in its thrall ever since. "I know of people who worked on it for 40 years," said Donald Richards, a statistician at Pennsylvania State University. "I myself worked on it for 30 years."
[...] No one is quite sure how, in the 21st century, news of Royen's proof managed to travel so slowly. "It was clearly a lack of communication in an age where it's very easy to communicate," [Bo'az] Klartag said.
"But anyway, at least we found it," he added—and "it's beautiful."
[...] The "feeling of deep joy and gratitude" that comes from finding an important proof has been reward enough. "It is like a kind of grace," he said. "We can work for a long time on a problem and suddenly an angel—[which] stands here poetically for the mysteries of our neurons—brings a good idea."
Source: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/elusive-math-proof-found-almost-lost
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:17PM
That would be foolish. Show me the being who can think of seven billion people as seven billion individual people and I'll show you someone who is not human. Neither I nor you have the cognitive ability to think of seven billion anything without using tools like statistics. So when you advise me to throw away one of the few tools we humans have for thinking of large numbers of anything without even the slightest advise as a replacement for that tool, you're just trying to make our collective ignorance worse.
And of course, you have nothing to say of the rituals of health care itself. Certainly thinking of seven billion people as seven billion people doesn't make health care work any better since one can't help all seven billion people at once (much less help them with that point of view).