Germany.
North Rhine-Westphalia.
The round conference table in the meeting room at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics was packed with people, making the room feel somewhat cramped.
Sitting at the conference table and studying the expressions of the other attendees, Faltings was filled with complicated emotions.
Before this, he had never imagined it.
This internal symposium of the Bourbaki School, convened to resolve the grand unified theory, had ultimately turned into a "review meeting" to deliver a final verdict on the proposition...
It felt as though some unseen fate was at work, as if his hopes had been destined to go unfulfilled from the very beginning.
What both delighted and worried him had happened after all...
The many scholars seated at the conference table were unusually silent.
Partly because astonishment had consumed all their thoughts, and partly because they were so astonished that they did not know what to say...
Even if they wanted to offer an opinion, they had to finish reading the paper first.
Precisely for this reason, from yesterday through today, the mainstream voices that truly held sway in the mathematics community had remained remarkably silent. So far, not a single prominent scholar had offered a professional assessment.
"So that's it."
Professor Fefferman was the first to break the silence in the meeting room.
As he studied the paper in his hands, his eyes narrowed into crescent-shaped slits. The admiration showing through his crow's-feet made him look as though he were examining an exquisite work of art.
"The deeper and more complex a truth is, the more minimalist its expression tends to be. And the motives we have been studying are, just as we expected, the common source of all beautiful cohomologies."
"These beautiful properties remind me of Plato's allegory of the cave. Could they all