The interesting thing to me is how poorly-understood irrationality is. Despite it being relatively common knowledge nowadays that pi is irrational, we've only

The interesting thing to me is how poorly-understood irrationality is. Despite it being relatively common knowledge nowadays that pi is irrational, we've only proven that pi is irrational in the past 300 years or so. And the proof is not simple (at least to me) As the article states, we didn't have a general purpose "plug this number in and it'll spit out whether the number is rational or not" formula. The irrationality proofs that we do have tend to bespoke to the structure of the number itself. That's why this research is exciting.