[Link] The Paradox of the Proof

In the course of two days, two backlog (and very much unrelated) articles mentioning Shinichi Mochizuki came up in my kindle, this one being the first, the other about he might be the creator of Bitcoin.

On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet.

The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades.

Then Mochizuki walked away. He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world. He just posted the papers, and waited.

If the story alone doesn't ruse you, I have to say that the character itself is by definition, not your normal run of the mill human - this is not a bad thing nor is meant to be that way - he is, after all, the "Inter-universal Geometer" and he even has a page that validates he is alive and safe.

The Paradox of the Proof from Project Wordsworth