3 ms·
> I maintain that no amount of human verification and re-verification will result in my being as confident of this result as I am about most mathematical result
by edanm 6y ago
> I maintain that no amount of human verification and re-verification will result in my being as confident of this result as I am about most mathematical results that I know. The only way to actually make this into something we should be confident of is to translate the existing proofs to something computer checkable.
Or to indeed find that simpler proof, I suppose?
(Not disagreeing with anything you're saying, just checking - it's a fascinating story that I didn't know about this topic)
- schoen 6y agoI don't understand this area well at all, but I know the existing classification of finite simple groups is very long and detailed. Wikipedia says > The proof consists of tens of thousands of pages in several hundred journal articles and that the second-generation simplified version might possibly run to only 5,000 pages. 5,000 pages of math is easier to understand and/or believe in than tens of thousands of pages, but it's still a pretty daunting amount even for specialists.