This is essentially irrelevant to the content of the post, but it's amusing to me that he casually mentions submitting to JAMS as if its acceptance were a mere formality.
> The following year, we managed to finally prove the full conjecture without the epsilon loss, and decided to try submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the previous literature!
At this scale, peer review happens by the audience. They don't need a journal to get people reviewing their work.
To be clear, the colleagues I am referring to mostly work in math phys. They are sole author papers, but I refer to them as first author, since that is the language I am now accustomed to.
And no, the culture in maths vs. theoretical stats is not really that different at the end of the day, and the latter is most assuredly like other STEM fields. I still collaborate on pure math papers (geometric analysis and PDEs mostly) from time to time, and it isn't really a different head space. My name is typically later in the alphabet, so I never even think about the alphabetical ordering.