I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don’t know, there’s probably a lot of people feeling odd emotions tonight.
I’ve always felt the joy of mathematics was in the labor, never the outcome. Those 1000 of hours of joy don’t go away just because someone else proved the theorem, just as you don’t lose the time you spent with a girlfriend after the relationship ends.
The beauty of mathematics, on the other hand, lies more in the structure than the struggle. This is likely true of other human endeavors: sculpture, painting, literature. Is David beautiful because Michelangelo labored hard to “remove the superfluous”? Is the copy in the Soumaya museum, somehow less beautiful because it is a copy?
There was a melancholy comment about this on Hacker News that I appreciated:
score 1 · canonical
I’ve always felt the joy of mathematics was in the labor, never the outcome. Those 1000 of hours of joy don’t go away just because someone else proved the theorem, just as you don’t lose the time you spent with a girlfriend after the relationship ends.
The beauty of mathematics, on the other hand, lies more in the structure than the struggle. This is likely true of other human endeavors: sculpture, painting, literature. Is David beautiful because Michelangelo labored hard to “remove the superfluous”? Is the copy in the Soumaya museum, somehow less beautiful because it is a copy?
score 1 · canonical