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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 07 2018, @09:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the pics-or-it-didn't-happen dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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

Abstract

Paper


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:58PM (#718778)

    Maybe he just didn't care much and wanted a quick and easy way to publish.

    This author deserves a little more generosity of spirit. Maybe he wants to spend his time focusing on mathematical beauty, rather than pesky reviewer comments. He is retired and maybe wants to publish in a place where he can easily read the other papers (which he can probably do as editor). Not a bad attitude. In this day and age, most journals seem less and less reasonable. They make the authors transfer the paper copyright (i.e. give away the work), and charge outrageous fees to publish and read papers. By publishing in an obscure journal, he has taken away from the big journals, which act as rent-seeking gatekeepers.