‘Outsiders’ Crack a 50-Year-Old Math Problem

Erica Klarreich:

Mathematicians in these disciplines greeted the news with a combination of delight and hand-wringing. The solution, which Casazza and Tremain called “a major achievement of our time,” defied expectations about how the problem would be solved and seemed bafflingly foreign. Over the past two years, the experts in the Kadison-Singer problem have had to work hard to assimilate the ideas of the proof. Spielman, Marcus and Srivastava “brought a bunch of tools into this problem that none of us had ever heard of,” Casazza said. “A lot of us loved this problem and were dying to see it solved, and we had a lot of trouble understanding how they solved it.”

“The people who have the deep intuition about why these methods work are not the people who have been working on these problems for a long time,” said Terence Tao, of the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been following these developments. Mathematicians have held several workshops to unite these disparate camps, but the proof may take several more years to digest, Tao said. “We don’t have the manual for this magic tool yet.”