[derbOac]

Inspiring? Because of the twin prime conjecture success following his time in the wilderness? I suppose so.

I'm tired of tales like this in academics though. That's not a criticism of you for telling the tale, I'm just so tired of this kind of thing in academics in general. So, so, so much politics and public reputation management. Zhang should have never had to suffer like that.

As my own research has drifted more into math, I've been surprised at how many assertions in the literature turn out to be false. Not just false, but propagated into the applied literature extensively, and even when you point out the problems a lot of defensiveness and denial about it along the lines of Zhang's story.

I agree about wondering what would have happened if LLMs had been around in 1986. My guess is the outcome would have been the same for the same reasons?

My experience with LLMs in proofs is they can be very helpful, but also very wrong. It's like having another person with another set of hunches about what path to go down.

[hintymad]

> So, so, so much politics and public reputation management. Zhang should have never had to suffer like that.

Very true. Unfortunately, when there are people, there will be politics. I remember when reading Yau's autobiography, I kept marvel how much calculation, or "politics" if you will, that Yau mentioned or implied in the book.

> My guess is the outcome would have been the same for the same reasons?

At least Zhang didn't have to spend 7 years working on the Jacobian conjecture. He said in an interview that he always wanted to work on number theory. Moh asked him to work on Jacobian, and he obliged.

[somenameforme]

Planck's Principle: 'Science advances one funeral at a time.' [1]

In his exact words: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it... An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth."

And he said that having lived, as a outsized figure, through the late 19th to mid 20th century of physics, which was the absolute golden age for such.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle

[bluGill]

The more important lesson for those of us are are "old" is to not get stuck in things that were learned in the past when they are found false.

If you are not yet old, remember this - it is very likely you will old in a few years.

[somenameforme]

It's more nuanced because many things are never really found false, or can't realistically be falsified. Planck was implicitly referencing the whole controversy over quantum mechanics, and how exactly to interpret it. None other than Einstein refused, all the way to his death, to accept a probabilistic interpretation in spite of all evidence pointing in that direction.

He simply believed on a fundamental level that the universe must be deterministic. Many don't understand that many of his famous quotes like 'spooky action at a distance' or 'god doesn't play dice' were mocking probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics, like the Copenhagen Model - the one we still assume to this very day.

Of course there even remains the possibility that at some point in the future he may even be proven correct. And at this point I'm playing into the very same mindset that essentially explains where Planck's Principle comes from, but perhaps such being a part of humanity is not an entirely bad thing. It's certainly been with us even as mankind has gone through unprecedented leaps of understanding and technological advancement.

[12_throw_away]

> None other than Einstein refused, all the way to his death, to accept a probabilistic interpretation in spite of all evidence pointing in that direction. [...] Of course there even remains the possibility that at some point in the future he may even be proven correct

To the extent that decoherence is the currently favored interpretation of quantum mechanics, that's basically now. In that picture, god does not play dice with the universe, rather the observers are themselves the dice.

[peterfirefly]

We are all Wigner's friend. That rock over there, those specks of dust here, the wings of all the butterflies, the moons of Titan, and SN 1987A. Everything is just Wigner's friend.