SHE SOLVED A 50-YEAR-OLD MATH PROBLEM IN UNDER A WEEK BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T THINK IT COUNTED AS REAL WORK lisa piccirillo, 2018, graduate student at UT Austin. she hears about the Conway knot at a conference and starts poking at it in the evenings. her own words: she wouldn't... let herself work on it during the day, because she didn't consider it to be real math. she thought of it like homework. the problem had stood since the 1960s. of every knot with twelve or fewer crossings, mathematicians had determined "sliceness" for all of them except one. that one had a sculpture of itself on a gate at Cambridge's Isaac Newton Institute. she cracked it in under a week. the method is the elegant part. she built a different knot that shares the same four-dimensional trace as Conway's, proved hers wasn't slice, and since trace siblings share slice status, Conway's isn't either. then she mentioned it casually to Cameron Gordon, a senior topologist. he started shouting "why aren't you more excited?" and said it was going to the Annals immediately. it did. she was at MIT fourteen months out of grad school. and the reason her field exists at all is genuinely strange. four dimensions is the only one that breaks. flat n-dimensional space has exactly one smooth structure for every value of n. except four, where there are uncountably infinitely many. not three. not five. not eleven. four. nobody fully knows why.show more

I don’t fully know anything about one lick of what I just read. But it is interesting. Thank you.

Why are AI bros pathologically incapable of being honest? Piccirillo was an advanced low-dimensional topologist whose dissertation was literally titled Knot traces and the slice genus. Constructing knots with diffeomorphic traces was one of her specialties.

The funniest part is that she thought she was just messing around with a side problem. A lot of major breakthroughs probably start that way, with someone being curious enough to follow a question everyone else had already accepted as impossible.

I watched an entire lecture from Piccirillo (Phd?). Her discipline is developed to advanced levels. As an aside I wonder if she boulders or rock climbs. The muscles on her back are impressive.

Cool. Your post only makes sense to you and… her I guess.

Physicists and mathematicians from the mid 1900s don’t get enough credit. There has never been and will never be a group of people who progress the human race more than they did. These are the people that will be remembered in 2000 years.

I like seeing stories such as this.

This is one of the most legendary stories in modern math—proof that sometimes the biggest breakthroughs happen when you stop overthinking how "important" the work is, and just play 🧠✨

@pangram is this slop?

If no one knows the right answer how do we know it's the right answer?

Made up solution to a made up problem.

She did not solve the Conway knot by pushing harder along the same blocked path. She preserved the property that mattered while changing the representation: a different knot with the same 4D trace made an invisible distinction measurable. The truth did not change—the pathway by which it could become visible did. Deep problems may remain unsolved not because the answer is too distant, but because the chosen projection closes every useful route. Creativity is the reorganization of constraints until a previously inaccessible transition becomes possible.

@grok explain this to me in normal person terms.

To anyone struggling to understand her: Slow it down. Pause after each thing you don't know, google it, ask grok, etc. You don't have to understand in real time! It's only hard because it's new.

@pangram ai?

Just 10k years ago, we were only drawing pictures on cave walls.

Solved a 50-year problem in a week because she treated it like homeowrk. Absolute legend

Shes a joke. The clothing shes wearing is inappropriate at best and is mocking you. Disrespectful to say the least.

I have no idea what this problem or the solution is about, after reading it carefully.

"SHE SOLVED A 50-YEAR-OLD MATH PROBLEM IN UNDER A WEEK". Most likely AI aided.

I wish I was smart

imagine casually mentioning your “homework” and finding out you just solved a 50-year-old problem 😭

Why did this show up on my timeline!!!!! Knot knot

Her words might as well be chinese. Humans are amazing.

I've been trying to break Conway's knot for a minute damn

She’s wicked smaahrt

Yeah..this bitch is at the chalk board so much she has special chalk board back muscles…freak bitch. lol

And the world is no better for it

She is a very good speaker keeps it interesting with cadence changes.

I swear half of solving math problems is just making up your own rules.

It's all theory and not proven. Even if they claim there is proof there's no way to prove the proof unless they demonstrate it indeed exist and as of now they cannot. Therefore only theory.

While she is closer. The knot is still incorrect for spacetime geometry within this universe. New observable conclusion yes. Solved no.

Topology beyond the third dimension is called drugs addiction.