Reports of the slowdown of scientific progress are wildly exaggerated.[a] Scientific -- and mathematical -- progress continues in fits and starts, as always, t

Reports of the slowdown of scientific progress are wildly exaggerated.[a] Scientific -- and mathematical -- progress continues in fits and starts, as always, thanks to individuals who labor in relative obscurity, year after year. Journalists tend to became aware of past progress only after it has gained wide recognition or become accepted dogma. By the time you read about it in vox.com, it's history. Katalin Karikó labored on mRNA vaccines for decades with approximately zero mainstream media coverage. Jeff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun worked on deep neural nets for decades with approximately zero mainstream media coverage. Yitang Zhang labored for decades on prime numbers, making sandwiches for a living (!!!), with approximately zero media coverage. Their stories are typical. Scientific and mathematical progress is invisible to almost everyone until suddenly it isn't. --- [a] With apologies to Mark Twain.