Isn’t that how most of us are solving complex problems? Building context and then walking away from the desk for a walk, or perhaps while we’re in the shower in the morning or at night, not focused on the problem but our brain working on it in the background until it is brought forward to our consciousness?

There are many similar stories. Famously Tesla's recollection of himself "inventing the inductive motor" while walking in some garden in Hungary, and the discovery of the Benzene ring.

I often do this when I need a good solution to a problem:

Work hard on it for a while, then leave it for one-two days. More often then not this give a way better end result.

That was my thought. Why is it so damn complex? You’d think the solution would be simpler.

Sometimes complicated things are complicated.

the full equation for general relativity would take many pages to print, but Einstein notation makes it much shorter looking. This was not the case here.

Probably looks a lot simpler in A-normal form, with intermediates factored out.

> You’d think the solution would be simpler.

Why would I think that?

It is. Some parts are repeated, the one which caught my eye was (zₐ’(rₐ)²+1)

I mean, if it was simpler it wouldn't have taken 2000 years.

I don't see the correlation here. Is every equation henceforth discovered guaranteed to be more complex than any before it? I hope not.

That formula is just a Mathematica dump. If you read the paper, which is unfortunately paywalled, you'll see the result is the solution to a complex system of equations, which are far easier to digest than the result you see there.

This seems to be a version of it: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03792

> Poof! And the solution

...snapped into focus

mind-blown by that formula

amazing what people think of

It wasn't thought of, it was calculated using a computer algebra system. Such systems are very powerful, but tend to be fairly bad at writing things nicely and simplifying, so they often produce insanely big and complicated formulas.