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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

A collective effort to scrutinize one of the biggest mysteries in mathematics has ended with a few clues but no firm answers.

The mystery concerns an impenetrable but potentially groundbreaking proof — of a puzzle known as the abc conjecture — that appeared online three years ago [nature.com]. Whether the proof is valid is still not clear — a source of frustration for some of the leading specialists who gathered at the University of Oxford on 7–11 December to discuss the matter.

Others say that the workshop, in which the proof's reclusive architect Shinichi Mochizuki made a rare, virtual appearance, has at least boosted prospects for a resolution.

The quest to understand Mochizuki's proof [nature.com] dates back to August 2012, when he quietly posted four papers on his website in which he claimed to have solved the abc conjecture [nature.com]. The problem gets its name from expressions of the form a + b = c and connects the prime numbers that are factors of a and b with those that are factors of c. Its solution could potentially change the face of number theory, which deals with the fundamental properties of, and relationships between, whole numbers.

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