- #36
Loststudent22
- 100
- 15
Slightly off topic but why is massive collaboration so common in the sciences but not in mathematics? For example in physics the higgs boson discovery had like 3k authors, where in math its almost always been 1 or 2 authors working in isolation. For example Andrew wiles working for 7 years in secret on Fermats last theorem before collaborated to fix the proof with richard taylor or perelman working alone for years to prove the poincare conjecture and even yitang zang working in secret to prove the gap between primes. Those are some of the biggest recent discoveries in math also.