Terence Tao

Again, actually this blow-up regularity type problem.

And it was considered very hard.

Jean Bourguin, who was another field specialist who worked on a special case of this, but he could not solve the general case.

And we worked on this problem for two months, and we thought we solved it.

We had this cute argument that if everything fit, we were excited.

We were planning celebrationary to all get together and have champagne or something.

And we started writing it up.

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.