Cal Newport

So he's explaining here a lot of things had to come together to find this answer, which is why no one had before.

It's not that hard of an answer once you see it.

So why had we not found that?

And he went through these reasons.

People weren't looking for it.

They thought Erdos was correct.

There was two concepts that came together, and you would have to know both those concepts.

There's some perseverance that was required.

But there's a phrase in here that I want to pick up on because it's going to tell us more generally what's happening in mathematics.

Bloom said...

this result has, quote, echoes previous achievements, end quotes.

So what's he talking about here?

Well, in recent years, there's actually been an explosion in using computer-aided math tools in professional mathematicians.

Now, these type of tools have been around for a long time, but what's happened more recently is we've combined and augmented these tools with LLMs.

LLMs plus existing computer-aided math tools

has created an explosion of new results.

It's uncovering a lot of results that tend to have the same sort of characteristics, namely that they are too tedious

for most humans to fruitfully pursue, right?

It's because the results that these computer-aided tools with LLMs are looking at, they often require either like a systematic search of some type of space, which would be so boring, you wouldn't even want like a new grad student to do this, and it would take forever.

Also, these tools can draw on