What a great story! I'm not sure why I felt teary eyed reading it, but I was. If you're here in the comments but haven't read it -- it is worth the read.
Beautiful article. Reading this after having mixed feeling and honestly a bit depressed about the Navier-Stokes situation feels almost like therapy, and I had to try really hard to hold back tears.
The Riverside Park has always been beautiful but particularly this time of year. Maybe I should pay a visit again, sitting on a bench thinking thoughts.
In spite of it all I do love human obsessives, with all their charming inefficiencies. This made me want to work as hard as I can on something important to me. I’m going to spend the night reading poems. And a great reminder of the value of a good mentor
> Dr. Breuillard had been leading an effort to solve the question with the help of an A.I. chatbot. That humans appear to have sorted it out first — and these three particular humans — “almost feels like a blessing,” he said.
A heartwarming story about a teenager cold-emailing a famous mathematician and getting mentorship—provided that she lives ten blocks away, rapidly solves Herstein problems with original proof ideas, catches the interest of multiple topologists, and eventually helps solve a decades-old open problem.
The takeaway for ordinary students is presumably: “Simply be an extraordinary mathematical talent who happens to live next door to a lonely 92-year-old legend.”
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] threadyou should not be proud that you cannot even see the ossification inside your head
The Riverside Park has always been beautiful but particularly this time of year. Maybe I should pay a visit again, sitting on a bench thinking thoughts.
This is possibly more exciting and of more future value than solving Navier Stokes.
It also shows us a way, when it seems we are lost.
https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/scienc...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/science/92-year-old-mathe...
> Dr. Breuillard had been leading an effort to solve the question with the help of an A.I. chatbot. That humans appear to have sorted it out first — and these three particular humans — “almost feels like a blessing,” he said.
This is such a contrast to current OpenAI controversy: https://bbc.com/news/articles/cy7zygy3rl2o
1) first dissuade others from proving the theorem
2) use child labor to actually prove the theorem
The takeaway for ordinary students is presumably: “Simply be an extraordinary mathematical talent who happens to live next door to a lonely 92-year-old legend.”