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Comment by chengiz | Hacker News Reader

> The conjecture was widely believed to be true — if so, it would have automatically validated several other important results in the field — but the community greeted the new development with both enthusiasm and surprise: the author was a 17-year-old who hadn’t yet finished high school.

This article is quite poorly written. Case in point above. If the conjecture was believed to be true, refuting it would be news in itself, deserve more than half a sentence, and have nothing to do with the age of the refuter. It should have been simple to add a line about the "other important results" and not violate show not tell. AlsO I fail to see the relevance of mentioning the Spanish academy? The researcher is from Bahamas/USA, it's just the writer is from Spain?

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>This article is quite poorly written.

Her last name is misspelt in the very first paragraph as well.

Oh come on. This is in the Spanish newspaper El Pais. Context and audience matters. It’s simultaneously news about a math problem, an article about a young mathematician, and an article about things that happened at a math conference in Spain, which is where they presumably interviewed her.

Sure context and audience matters, but even outside of that the article is rather poorly written. This part in particular should really emphasize that she disproved the conjecture, as it stands it almost sounds like she proved it:

> Cairo solved the so-called Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a problem first proposed in the 1980s that had kept the harmonic analysis community had been working on for decades. The conjecture was widely believed to be true — if so, it would have automatically validated several other important results in the field — but the community greeted the new development with both enthusiasm and surprise: the author was a 17-year-old who hadn’t yet finished high school.

From the first paragraph of the article:

> "After months of trying to prove the result, I managed to understand why it was so difficult. I realized that if I used that information correctly, I might be able to refute the claim. Finally, after several failed attempts, I found a way to construct a counterexample [a case that does not satisfy the studied property and therefore proves it is not universally true]."

That makes it quite clear that she refuted it.

This excerpt features a terrible typo, so I agree it's poorly written, or at least not properly proof read. I don't agree with your specific criticism of the excerpt though. I think the excerpt makes it perfectly clear she disproved the conjecture by highlighting how that was potentially a disappointing outcome.

The writer introduced and resolved the potential disappointment much more elegantly and in far fewer words than I can manage here by paraphrasing. I admire that and feel it's indicative of good writing, albeit spoiled by an earlier typo.

> It should have been simple to add a line about the "other important results" and not violate show not tell.

Only a very tiny fraction of the publication's readers will have any idea what the heck the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture is. Naming the important results that Mizohata–Takeuchi being true would have validated would have been just technobable to nearly everyone reading the article.

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