Hasnain says:

“That process involved several surprising steps, including “what’s in my mind the most important idea, which still seems a bit magical to me,” Maynard said. At one point, there was a seemingly obvious step they should have taken to simplify their sum. Instead, they left it in its longer and more complicated form. “We do something that at first sight looks completely stupid. We just refuse to do the standard simplification,” Maynard said. “And this gives up a lot. It means that now we can’t get any easy bound for this sum.”

But in the long run, this turned out to be an advantageous move. “In chess you call it a gambit, where you sacrifice a piece to get a better position on the board,” Maynard said. Guth likened it to playing with a Rubik’s Cube; sometimes you have to undo previous moves and make everything look worse before finding a way to get more colors in the right place.”

Posted on 2024-08-02T05:37:50+0000