First paragraph: "A mathematical puzzle that resisted solution for 80 years — including computerized attempts to crack it — appears to have yielded to a single mathematician."
This irks me.
>This irks me.
It didn't bother me because I don't interpret the "collaboration" and "single mathematician" as contradictory. In other words, all mathematics is built upon group contributions whether the collaboration happens digitally online or via letters transported across 17th century continental Europe.
In this case, "single mathematician" doesn't mean a person who discovered every insight and connected all the dots. Instead, it means the one who connected the last dot. So far, it looks like Tao solved the last step of the puzzle and no one else independently solved it and submitted a proof at the same time. Contrast this situation to the invention of calculus which was simultaneously created by Newton and Leibniz.
There were plenty of precursors to calculus, coming from the likes of Descartes, Fermat and Pascal. For example: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/The_rise_of_c...
In other words, if you think this degree of collaboration is enough to characterize the discovery as not individual, then there have been no individual discoveries ever. But that's not a very useful definition, because there are clearly some discoveries that are much more collaborative than others.
Just repeating his name here because i think his contribution should not be missed.
The proof relies on a variation of a recently proven conjecture.