Terence Tao

these objects that have taken decades to prove in all these different math papers.

And so lots of these have to be formalized as well.

Kevin Buzzard's goal, actually, he has a five-year grant to formalize Fermat's last theorem.

And his aim is that he doesn't think he will be able to get all the way down to the basic axioms

But he wants to formalize it to the point where the only things that he needs to rely on as black boxes are things that were known by 1980 to number theorists at the time.

And then some other work would have to be done to get from there.

So it's a different area of mathematics than the type of mathematics I'm used to.

In analysis, which is kind of my area, the objects we study are kind of much closer to the ground.

I study things like prime numbers and

and functions, and things that are within the scope of a high school math education to at least define.

But then there's this very advanced algebraic side of number theory where people have been building structures upon structures for quite a while.

It's a very sturdy structure.

At the base, at least, it's extremely well developed with textbooks and so forth.

But it does get to the point where if you haven't taken these years of study and you want to ask about what is going on at level six of this tower, you have to spend quite a bit of time before they can even get to the point where you can see something you recognize.

Yeah, that is a romantic, yeah, so it kind of fits with sort of the romantic image I think people have of mathematicians to the extent they think of them at all as these kind of eccentric, you know, wizards or something.

So that certainly kind of fits.

accentuated that perspective.

You know, I mean, it's, it is a great achievement.

His style of solving problems is so different from my own.

But, which is great.