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A comment on Monumental advance in number theory posted to the ArXiv by Yitang Zhang. Parent comment

Re:Monumental advance in number theory posted to the ArXiv b... by bigbacaloa on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @01:54AM (#33516579)
The professional math world is full of smart but delusionally ambitious people who do things like focus all their energy on the Jacobian conjecture and the Riemann hypothesis. Most crash out never finishing their doctorates (because these problems are too hard and working on them does not provide what it takes to survive professionally). Zhang is an example of such a person. What is very unusual about him is not that he continued to work on such things anyway, rather that he eventually found some measure of success. What I infer from his story is that he is tremendously stubborn and genuinely oblivious to ordinary material feedback. Evidently he has some talent too, but that's not the unusual part of his story.

Said another way - I've known quite a few people like him to a point - with the difference that none of the others ever produced good mathematics, much less solved a major problem.

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Re:Monumental advance in number theory posted to the ArXiv b... by yifanl on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @11:44AM (#33521060)
> people who do things like focus all their energy on the Jacobian conjecture ... Most crash out never finishing their doctorates (because these problems are too hard and working on them does not provide what it takes to survive professionally).

In Zhang's case, I believe his doctoral thesis actually proved the Jacobian conjecture... but his thesis was relying on an incorrect result given by his advisor's own paper (presumably at the guidance of his advisor).

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Re:Monumental advance in number theory posted to the ArXiv b... by arjmandi on Friday November 11, 2022 @02:27AM (#33558150)
He had a talk three days ago, explaining his thesis where he remarked: “When the paper was posted online just a few days ago, many people who don’t focus on mathematics didn’t understand it, thinking that it was the Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture solved, and some even thought that it proved the Riemann Hypothesis is wrong. Actually, I don’t have this ability. I only partially solve the Riemann hypothesis within a certain range. If I say I overturned Riemann Hypothesis, few people would believe it.”[1]

Maybe he loves what he's doing and that's the root of being stubborn and "genuinely oblivious to ordinary material feedback". Although love or passion can be overrated or too general to describe his attitude toward problem-solving, I think people can't be just stubborn, there's a drive that holds them to a higher standard.

[1]https://pandaily.com/mathematician-yitang-zhang-confirms-par...

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