This outsider surprised the math community.

This outsider surprised the math community.

Number theory

Four years ago, Shinichi Mochizuki (47) claimed to have solved one of the hardest puzzles in mathematics. Experts were rude: nobody caught this Japanese. But since a conference in Kyoto last month, there is optimism.

How many people in the world would walk around with the profession of interuniversal geometry? There is in any case one and he is called Shinichi Mochizuki. This Japanese presents himself on his website as such and he is probably not only the only one who calls 'interuniversal geometric' but also the only one who knows exactly what this term means.

Mochizuki's freaky-looking website is full of childish poems: a spinning globe, a bending male, a lightening bulb.

But whoever clicks on one of Mochizuki's articles on the same website immediately notices that it has been done with the messenger: mathematical symbols that do not even know professional mathematicians are flying around your ears, like a paper from the future or from another planet is readable.

In the morning of Thursday, August 30, 2012, Mochizuki put four articles on his site. Subject: The 'Interuniversal Teichmüller Theory'. Scope: about 500 pages. With its completely new theory, Mochizuki would have proved the so-called 'abc suspects', one of the major outstanding issues in the number theory (see dedication).

No mail to his colleagues mathematicians or the editors of a scientific journal, no messages on social media - the mathematician community had to find out that it had reached a milestone.

That did not take long: thanks to Google Scholar, a service that searches for scientific articles on the internet, many mathematicians were informed after two days. Excitement alright, even though the news did not come as a thunder in clear skies. Mochizuki was not known in mathematics and he had no secret that he had been abc suspected for years.

It retrieved the science pages of many newspapers. On 12 September 2012, NRC quoted Leiden's number theorist Bart de Smit: "If it is correct, it's a huge breakthrough. But now, about 500 pages is nothing to say. We can only go to the author's reputation. And that is good. Mochizuki holds a leading role in mathematics. "

Arsenal to new concepts

We are now four years ahead. Mochizuki's work is so elusive that it is neither accepted nor referred to the trash can. In his interuniversal Teichmüller theory (see insertion), which forms the basis for the evidence, he introduces an arsenal to new concepts. With this he does not make it easy for his colleagues. After himself there is no one who fully understands the work of the Japanese. "It's already a heroic achievement if you find out in a Mochizuki article that means a particular message. Only understanding of its definitions and notations costs hours, "says emeritus professor Hendrik Lenstra, a colleague of De Smit.

What is normal in such a situation is that you pass different universities across the world to give presentations, explaining your theory. Only in this way will you allow your peers to understand your work. But there, Mochizuki, who works at the University of Kyoto Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences does not make sense because he is "not traveling".

“It is recommended that you look at some useful information for
you. Please click here”