Re:I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
by cokernel on Monday February 15, 2016 @11:29AM
(#11104194)
The structure of Doron Zeilberger's proof of the Alternating Sign Matrix Conjecture is reminiscent of this, though possibly not directly inspired by it: http://www.combinatorics.org/ojs/index.php/eljc/article/view...
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/l...
As far as I can tell, nobody has really adopted any of his proposals yet, and most papers continue to be written in pseudo-prose. Remember, mathematics used to be written in full prose (e.g. "the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides") and it took hundreds of years for us to realise that "x^2 + y^2 = z^2" was a better notation.
While mathematics may be "genuinely very difficult to understand", so is any complex piece of software. Software engineering techniques might be useful to mathematicians, even if they are all new-fangled and modern.