Terence Tao

But sometimes you just get this enormous complexity.

The act of reproduction and splitting DNA is fairly simple, but it leads to immense biodiversity.

Well, because we have to check an infinite number of cases.

Yeah, so there was a project, I think it was called Collapse Grid, which was exactly that.

Like Steady at Home, but for Collapse.

And it did extend the numbers.

So a couple quadrillion, I think, or 10 to the 18, 10 to the 19, we could do from this crowdsourcing.

But no matter how much you do, there's still an infinite number of numbers left to go.

So if you want to roll out all the numbers, you need...

You need proofs.

You need to use mathematical laws over all numbers.

Otherwise, it's not elegant and it's not even interesting.

So I worked on this a couple of years ago.

I proved a result that if you take a really large number, like 10 to 15, 10 to 20, whatever, I could show statistically that 99% of all numbers that are very, very big

would become very, very small and become much smaller than where they started.

I couldn't show they hit one, but I could show that 99% of all numbers become as small as say the logarithm of the number.

So like 10 to the 20, I could show drops down to 20, 10 to the 100 drops down to 100.

So in mathematics, we very much value partial progress.

They're very good.

Yeah.