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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: 2) by lentilla on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:19AM
Cars being too complicated for me, I liked this explaination [czerniak.info]. Going back through my notes, I see I used a Kalman filter in 2013 when I was trying to get a sensible altitude reading out of my GPS (the readings bounce around, 60 metres up, 20 metres down, and so on).