So last fall, when Math, Inc. told the group that Gauss had solved about 30 unfinished pieces of the proof, Mr. Hariharan and his colleagues were enthusiastic. They asked the company to share its full results. Instead, the start-up went dark.<\/p>\n
Auguste Poiroux, a doctoral student at the \u00c9cole Polytechnique who also works for Math, Inc., said the company had turned its focus toward a new version of Gauss. The company decided to return to the sphere-packing problem only months later, using it as a test case for its upgraded system.<\/p>\n
Shockingly, Mr. Poiroux said, the improved Gauss completed the whole proof.<\/p>\n
Even more shocked was Dr. Viazovska, when an excited Mr. Poiroux gave her a glimpse of the \u201caccidental\u201d solution, as he described it. \u201cI quickly saw that the excitement was not shared,\u201d he said. He asked her to hold off on informing Mr. Hariharan, whom she emailed soon afterward.<\/p>\n
Mr. Hariharan\u2019s next call was to his parents in Dubai. \u201cYou wonder if it was all in vain,\u201d he said. \u201cWhy did you spend two years of your life on this in the first place?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTrust your guru,\u201d his parents told him. \u201cTrust in the process.\u201d<\/p>\n
That night, Jesse Han, Math, Inc.\u2019s chief executive, messaged Mr. Hariharan that he was boarding a red-eye flight to Pittsburgh. They met in a Starbucks the following morning, along with Mr. Hariharan\u2019s adviser, Jeremy Avigad, who rushed from the gym after \u201cthe fastest shower of his life,\u201d he recalled. After Dr. Han proposed disclosing the result immediately and moving on to a related formalization project, the academics erupted, arguing that the original goal of the project, to better understand Dr. Viazovska\u2019s proof, was far from complete.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So last fall, when Math, Inc. told the group that Gauss had solved about 30 unfinished pieces of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,37666,37668,5809,37667],"class_list":["post-66911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-graduate-schools-and-students","tag-maryna","tag-mathematics","tag-viazovska"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}