Good article; strikes a nice balance between a loving ode to a grandfather, and exploring how science is much more conservative than one might think.
Reminds me of this article [0], and specifically this passage, which makes the point that one metric of judging “crackpot ideas” that seem to come out of nowhere is by what they enable. Do they lead to the emergence of new results, or allow for the proof of things other than the direct thing that the theorem sets out to prove?
”Usually when there is a breakthrough in mathematics, there is an explosion of new activity when other mathematicians are able to exploit the new ideas to prove new theorems, usually in directions not anticipated by the original discoverer(s). This has manifestly not been the case for ABC, and this fact alone is one of the most compelling reasons why people are suspicious.”
Reminds me of this article [0], and specifically this passage, which makes the point that one metric of judging “crackpot ideas” that seem to come out of nowhere is by what they enable. Do they lead to the emergence of new results, or allow for the proof of things other than the direct thing that the theorem sets out to prove?
”Usually when there is a breakthrough in mathematics, there is an explosion of new activity when other mathematicians are able to exploit the new ideas to prove new theorems, usually in directions not anticipated by the original discoverer(s). This has manifestly not been the case for ABC, and this fact alone is one of the most compelling reasons why people are suspicious.”
[0] https://galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/the-a...