Which obviously leads to the epistemological problem that the article points out. You had extremely good mathematicians like Scholze look at it and thought he found a flaw, then one guy from Arizona disagreeing that it is a fatal flaw and claiming to have fixed it, which Scholze doesn't agree with.

So what do you really make of it if only a handful of mathematicians can engage with it, and they can't even agree with each other. Probably the biggest value of IUT is that it puts to the test what even counts as a proof.

[0]: https://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/Inter-universal%2...

You can express `a + b` or `a * b` in their regular algebraic notation or you can express them as a lambda expressions

ADD = λab.(a S)n

MUL = λxyz.x(yz)

Manipulating these expressions instead of algebra, you can suddenly compute things such as "+ * +" (Plus times plus). That will yield you another expression for sure, but we don't even know what that means.

So maybe an analogy would be, it's like you developed a field where, from that mess, you could derive important insights and even turn them back into proofs

And there's debate on whether all invariants truly are maintained throughout the entire process