>A consensus emerged that the highlight of the workshop was a lecture on 9 December by Kiran Kedlaya, an arithmetic geometer from the University of California, San Diego. He zeroed in on a result from a 2008 paper by Mochizuki that linked the statement of the abc conjecture to another branch of maths called topology. The link was immediately recognised as a crucial step in Mochizuki’s grand strategy.
This is why I'm making the reference to ancient lost texts. I mean, if the result of a 2008 paper is crucial, you'd think the guy would have just mentioned this fact. It's as though they're investigating some long dead guy's hidden thoughts. This is a direct quote: "There is still no clear answer to lingering questions about how things are ultimately going to fit together." What? Wouldn't the guy just tell you how they're ultimately going to fit together? I'm utterly perplexed at the process the article describes, when the author is available and can give hints.
> I mean, if the result of a 2008 paper is crucial, you'd think the guy would have just mentioned this fact.
Maybe he did? Or maybe it is just not crucial.∎
The article just states "The link was immediately recognised as a crucial step in Mochizuki's grand strategy."...that is just the writer's opinion.
Linking these papers to topology is trivial. The word "topological" alone occurs 111 times in the first paper. A lot of what I'm reading in this article, and others, is people complaining about not understanding something that they (probably/apparently) have not even read.
However... That a concept taking just a paragraph to explain* for people who know math requires a proof of over 500 pages. THAT is what I find mind boggling and I find hard to understand. That it can just balloon in size like that, especially given that mathematics is a language of logic.
Maybe ballooning is related to that...