TV program on ABC conjecture to air on April 10

The broadcast schedule was finally announced. A summary of the content is as follows:

「数学者は宇宙をつなげるか? abc予想証明をめぐる数奇な物語」 – NHKスペシャル

“Can Mathematicians Connect the Universe? The Strange Story of the Proof of the abc Conjecture”.

First broadcast date: April 10, 2022

  • Peer review of the paper is complete, so why does the heated debate over the proof continue?
  • What is the “abc Conjecture,” the unsolved problem in mathematics that Dr. Mochizuki proved?
  • Caution: Do not mix!? The entanglement of multiplication and addition creates many difficult problems.
  • The World of Dr. Mochizuki’s “The Interuniversal Teichmüller Theory,” dubbed “the paper from outer space”.
  • Secrets of a new theory that overturned 2000 years of conventional wisdom
  • What is the mysterious idea of “same but not the same”?
  • Toward a Leap into a New Mathematics
  • Narrated by Hisahiro Ogura

Judging from this summary, it is unlikely that the content reflects the reputation of the global mathematical community. No matter how much one introduces the appeal of a theory, it means nothing if the proof of that theory contains errors. I don’t see the point in introducing a theory by saying, “*If it were correct*, this would be such a revolutionary theory”.

There are still many people who consider the fact that a paper has been peer-reviewed as some kind of guarantee, but even the STAP cell paper was peer-reviewed and published in “Nature”.