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Comment by hatthew | Hacker News Reader

I think GP's point is that if the larger math community doesn't care about option C, Fefferman shouldn't have given that option in the first place.

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Fefferman and the larger math community are not the same actor; a divergence between their concerns is not surprising.

But Clay chose Fefferman to represent "the larger math community"? I'm calling out Clay/Fefferman here, not the community. Though the community also had over 25 years to contest the problem statement, and had no problem with it until now.

> But Clay chose Fefferman to represent "the larger math community"?

Surprisingly enough, being chosen by another actor as proxy for some group doesn’t actually resolve the problem that an individual may not always be an accurate proxy for the concerns of the group (and especially for the same descriptive aggregate group a generation after the proxy acts on their behalf.)

I'm pretty sure Fefferman's formulation of the problem got a lot of vetting before the Clay Institute accepted it. As such, it probably does reflect the math community's understanding of the problem. The "problem" such as it is, is that it might be the least interesting case especially given the solution that was obtained.

A solution to any of the four options made by an LLM armed with a theorem solver and millions of dollars of compute would still not be that interesting to the math community since it is not likely that any new insights oe questions can be derived from the result

yes!

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