Terence Tao

a project in mathematics or elsewhere that's really taken centuries or decades with lots and lots of previous work.

But that's a story that's difficult to tell if you're not an expert, because it's easier to just say one person did this one thing.

It makes for a much simpler history.

Yeah, so I was a graduate student at the time.

I vaguely remember there was press attention and everything.

Um, we all had the same, um, uh, we had pigeon holes in the same mail room, you know, so we all particular mail and like suddenly Andrew Wiles's mailbox exploded to be overflowing.

That's a good, that's a good metric.

Yeah.

You know, so yeah, we all talked about it at tea and so forth.

I mean, we didn't understand, most of us didn't understand the proof.

We understand sort of high-level details.

In fact, there's an ongoing project to formalize it in Lean.

Kevin buzzed it, I think.

It's really difficult to formalize now.

I guess you're right.

The objects that they use, you can define them.

They've been defined in Lean.

Just defining what they are can be done.

That's really not trivial, but it's been done.

There's a lot of really basic facts about