London, September 19 (ANI): A scholar in Japan may have finally cracked one of the world's most complex mathematical theories.
Shinichi Mochizuki, a mathematician at Kyoto University, has released four papers on the internet describing his proof of what is known as abc conjecture, the Telegraph reported.
People can view his paper, which is 500 pages long, on his website in a series of PDFs labelled "Teichmuller Theory".
He took four years to calculate and if confirmed it would be one of the greatest mathematical achievements of this century, experts said.
Confirming the breakthrough, however, may take many more year as Mochizuki has created an entirely new mathematical language to explain the steps that he took - and others in the field will have to learn to read it first.
The abc conjecture was first proposed by British mathematician David Masser, working with France's Joseph Oesterle, in 1985. It was, however, never proven.
The conjecture is stated in terms of three positive integers, a, b and c - from where the name is taken - which have no common factor and satisfy a plus b equals c. If d denotes the product of the distinct prime factors of abc, then the conjecture essentially states that d is rarely much smaller than c.
Dorian Goldfeld, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York, told Nature magazine that Mochizuki's discovery is "one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics in the 21st century."
On his web site, Mochizuki describes himself not as a mathematician but as a "inter-universal geometer" and - as long as his theory stands up to the scrutiny - there are hopes that his findings will settle a number of knotty problems in number theory and other branches of maths. (ANI)
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