The bizarre story of a maths proof that is only true in Japan

A 500-page proof that only a handful of people in the world claim to understand kicked off a saga unlike anything else in the history of mathematics – and now there’s a new twist to the story, says Jacob Aron A baffling proof of the ABC conjecture set off a bitter divide among mathematicians AndreasG/Shutterstock As a science journalist, there are some stories that you return to again and again. There is climate change, of course – the biggest story of our time. Then there are the big questions, such as “what is consciousness?” or “are we alone in the universe?”, and so on. But one of the stories I simply cannot let go of is a mathematical argument that has been raging for over a decade. I call it “the proof that is only true in Japan”. Let me start at the beginning. In 2012, mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki at Kyoto University, Japan, published an extraordinary set of papers, across 500 pages, detailing what he called inter-universal Teichmüller (IUT) theory. This was a framework f ... Read full article.