| ▲ | getnormality 2 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
In this case, a ton of progress had already been made. The conjecture had been proved in some cases, reduced to a simpler problem in others. This couple went the last mile of solving the simpler problem in some particularly thorny cases. You're really standing on the shoulders of giants when you rely on the classification of finite simple groups. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | btilly 2 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
You're really standing on the shoulders of giants when you rely on the classification of finite simple groups. Giants whose work has (dirty little secret) never truly been verified. The proof totals about 10,000 pages. At the end of the effort to prove it there were lots of very long papers, with a shrinking pool of experts reviewing them. There have been efforts to reprove it with a more easily verified proof, but they've gone nowhere. Hopefully, the growing ease of formalization will lead to a verification some day. But even optimistically that is still a few years out. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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