Shinichi Mochizuki’s proof is 500 pages long Newscom / Alamy
An attempt to fix problems with a controversial mathematical proof has itself become mired in controversy, in the latest twist in a saga that has been running for over a decade and has seen mathematicians trading unusually pointed barbs.
The story began in 2012, when Shinichi Mochizuki at Kyoto University, Japan, published a 500-page proof of a problem called the ABC conjecture. The conjecture concerns prime numbers involved in solutions to the equation a + b…
