Re:All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them re...
by soVeryTired on Thursday September 10, 2026 @07:17AM
(#49641780)
Yeah - I think he’s worried that we have a tool that’s almost an oracle that can just get straight to the heart of a given problem.
The problems aren’t always that interesting in their own right. But the quest to solve them is often what drives the invention of new techniques.
We ultimately got the Langlands program and a large amount of algebraic number theory out of attempts to solve fermat’s last theorem. A “clever” approach using techniques from the 1800s wouldn’t have been anywhere near as fruitful for mathematics as a discipline.
The problems aren’t always that interesting in their own right. But the quest to solve them is often what drives the invention of new techniques.
We ultimately got the Langlands program and a large amount of algebraic number theory out of attempts to solve fermat’s last theorem. A “clever” approach using techniques from the 1800s wouldn’t have been anywhere near as fruitful for mathematics as a discipline.