Terence Tao

And one of us, not me actually, but another co-author, said, oh, in this lemma here, we have to estimate these 13 terms that show up in this expansion.

And we estimated 12 of them, but in our notes, I can't find the estimation of the 13th, can you?

Can someone supply that?

And I said, sure, I'll look at this.

And actually, yeah, we completely omitted this term.

And this term turned out to be worse than the other 12 terms put together.

In fact, we could not estimate this term.

And we tried for a few more months, and all different permutations, and there was always this one term that we could not control.

And so this was very frustrating.

But because we had already invested months and months of effort in this already, we stuck at this.

We tried increasingly desperate things and crazy things.

And after two years, we found an approach that was somewhat different, but quite a bit from our initial strategy.

which actually didn't generate these problematic terms and actually solved the problem.

So we solved the problem after two years.

But if we hadn't had that initial false dawn of nearly solving the problem, we would have given up by month two or something and worked on an easier problem.

If we had known it would take two years, I'm not sure we would have started the project.

Sometimes actually having the incorrect, it's like Columbus traveling in the New World, the incorrect version of the measurement of the size of the Earth.

He thought he was going to find a new trade route to India.

Or at least that was how he sold it in his prospectus.

I mean, it could be that he secretly knew.