> What's the intuition that an extremely important proof will come from someone who gets all the TeX tweaked to camera-ready perfection, goes around and gives t

> What's the intuition that an extremely important proof will come from someone who gets all the TeX tweaked to camera-ready perfection, goes around and gives the talks, and all the conventional things I think it's more that vanishingly few people with poor notation are able to get things completely right. Mathematicians acquire this intuition from marking thousands of undergraduate students' work and attempting to understand the research of (at least) hundreds of postgraduate students and professional researchers (i.e. everyone "in the system"). In these people's work the intuition bad notation => mistakes is almost universally true, so the odds against an outsider with poor notation accomplishing something mathematicians have been failing to solve but chipping away at for decades are astronomical. It's not impossible, of course, but so unlikely that it's almost certainly not worth the time and effort to look into the details. It would be almost inevitably disappointing, and there's not enough time for the more trustworthy interesting stuff as it is. Edit: a person like the specific one you're describing can earn professionals' time and effort (trust) with smaller results that are both insightful and short and correct enough to be easily checked, and then showing that they can learn from their mistakes.