Amateur Mathematician Finds Smallest Universal Cover (quantamagazine.org)

Quite frustrating to see the same stories pop up twice while many good new stories go unseen.

‘amatur’ In the sense of a person undertaking work without being paid for it; like how Olympic atheletes traditionally were non-professionals (not being paid to be atheletes as their career).

‘Amatuer’ is sometimes used as an epithet to mean ‘novice/untrained’, but in mathematics the usual term is ‘lay’.

The title was litigated when this was posted just a few days ago. "Amateur" does not mean untrained. It means non-professional.

> Gibbs remained interested in academic questions, but there wasn’t much he could do as a nonprofessional researcher. “As an independent scientist it’s hard to keep up with everything that’s going on,” he said. “But if you find the right kind of niche, you can do some stuff and come up with some useful results.”

Amateur seem accurate, and relevant.

The misleading part is the word "smallest". For me that means he has proven that there exists no smaller cover. In the article, it means "smallest known".