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The first comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971802 (one of many HN posts discussing this ongoing s

• westoncb 7y ago
  From Terry Tao's comment: > It seems bizarre to me that there would be an entire self-contained theory whose only external application is to prove the abc conjecture after 300+ pages of set up, with no smaller fragment of this setup having any non-trivial external consequence whatsoever. This seems like the crux of the controversy: what is the true value in the 300+ "pages of set up"? Clearly he's providing a new framing for the problem. If that new framing ends up being applicable to other problems (which was presumably the author's intent), then the "pages of set up" are the true value here, not the proof of the abc conjecture itself. When Tao says, "no smaller fragment of this setup having any non-trivial external consequence whatsoever"—this is a comment about the state of things so far—but whether that will change is unknown. Maybe all of that "set up" ends up having no more general utility whatsoever, or maybe we shouldn't even expect to have found external consequences yet: very fundamental re-framings may be very disconnected from applications. Maybe Mochizuki has found one path from the new framing back into an area of contemporary mathematical interest, and maybe further exploration will yield an abundance of new paths—maybe some highways. Anyway just playing devil's advocate since the prevailing stance on this seems to be against Mochizuki in a way that feels odd to me.