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The last line is very humorous "Jäkel said he would have written up his thesis two years ago if not for the distraction of d(9). “I think I need a break,” he said."

If there are any mathematicians in the comments I'd love some layman's insight into why solving this problem is not itself worthy of a doctoral thesis in Maths.

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In many countries, the normal route to a ph.D. involves writing a thesis separately from papers you publish.

https://www.hochschulkompass.de/en/doctoral-studies/doctoral...:

The dissertation is the core of your doctoral degree and the most important piece of work you will produce for this degree. It is usually written as a monograph which is a comprehensive, self-contained treatment of a research topic.

[…]

Alongside the monographic dissertation, more and more faculties are offering the possibility of submitting a publication-based dissertation, known as a cumulative dissertation. This consists of several shorter pieces of work which are thematically linked.

The totality of the written doctoral works must satisfy the requirements of a monographic dissertation. Faculties which allow cumulative dissertations may have very different requirements, for example in relation to:

• The type of publication (book, journals, manuscript)

• The current status of the publications (published, submitted, in preparation)

• The scope of the publications and the results they contain, etc.

If you wish to write a cumulative dissertation, you should find out at an early stage whether this option is available at your faculty and if so, what requirements apply.

Even if his university allows such a bundling of papers chances are he still would have to write the texts that describe how they’re linked thematically, and possibly a layman’s description of the work, etc.

The phrase “written up” here means that he had already done the core part of his thesis work two years ago, even before starting on this problem: he had already proved enough results, possibly major parts of which had already even been published as papers, and it only remained to put them together in the coherent form of a thesis, schedule a thesis defence, etc. But this writing work was interrupted by the challenge of computing d(9), and he's describing starting/resuming the work of “just writing” as a break, from the harder work he has been doing on d(9).

He might have meant that there were lower-hanging fruits with which he could have written his theses much earlier and he got distracted by a more complex challenge.

It might have involved little novel work, "just" a lot of high quality programming, and access to a decent amount of CPU power. That is a problem I've seen with some similar results, can't comment how much was novel here in detail of course.

Not mathematician, but often one plans for their thesis one or two years before they think of graduation, and at that point thesis topic is kind of "fixed" so you need to execute ~70% of it. Anything risky you don't plan into the thesis

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