Mathematician announces that he's proved the ABC conjecture
Wednesday, September 12, 2012 - 07:02
in Mathematics & Economics
(Phys.org)—In all of history there are very few names that stand out in the field of mathematics, at least among those not in the field: Euclid, Newton, Pythagoras, etc. This is likely due to several reasons, chief among them is that math is so seldom used by most people and the fact that its use in other sciences causes the underlying concepts to become overshadowed. That might change if what Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University is claiming is true; that he has written a proof of the ABC conjecture. To mathematicians it's akin to the Grand Unified Theory of physics, a proof that would tie together most of the fundamental ideas in the field into one neat, fully explainable bundle.