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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now try that on this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis
This one is true though.
A lot of recent math discoveries seem to be geometrical: circle packing, infinitely tiling patterns, neighbor coloring theorem, ... I don't seem to see as much discoveries in other areas like number theory, calculus, algebra etc... Is this a bias of what gets covered on HN, or are this type of geometrical problems the currently most active field of mathematics?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: am American and I read it exactly as intentioned the first time. It didn't even occur to me to read it in the context you did until you mentioned it. I don't watch network news though.
I don’t watch network news either and had the same reaction as OP reading “two students shoot down” A better headline could be “Widely Believed Math Conjecture shot down by two students.”
A lot of recent math discoveries seem to be geometrical: circle packing, infinitely tiling patterns, neighbor coloring theorem, ... I don't seem to see as much discoveries in other areas like number theory, calculus, algebra etc... Is this a bias of what gets covered on HN, or are this type of geometrical problems the currently most active field of mathematics?
And then, Calculus took about 3 years for me to begin to scratch the surface... and realise I will never need it as numeric methods took over completely with the advent of cheap compute.
Would their summer research be an utter failure? Would they be unimpressive mathematicatians?
How much of math success is being lucky enough to stumble upon a tractable problem?
A lot of recent math discoveries seem to be geometrical: circle packing, infinitely tiling patterns, neighbor coloring theorem, ... I don't seem to see as much discoveries in other areas like number theory, calculus, algebra etc... Is this a bias of what gets covered on HN, or are this type of geometrical problems the currently most active field of mathematics?
A lot of recent math discoveries seem to be geometrical: circle packing, infinitely tiling patterns, neighbor coloring theorem, ... I don't seem to see as much discoveries in other areas like number theory, calculus, algebra etc... Is this a bias of what gets covered on HN, or are this type of geometrical problems the currently most active field of mathematics?
I'd say that HN posts a lot of quanta articles, and quanta has a "bias" towards results that can be explained to a semi-lay audience. You really don't want to know enough about modular elliptic curves to understand Wiles' proof of Fermat's conjecture. But sometimes number theory proofs come up here too.
What would happen if the conjecture happened to be true, and they did their data collection/computation, and got a bunch of data (called "0%" in mathematics) consistent with the conjecture? Would their summer research be an utter failure? Would they be unimpressive mathematicatians? How much of math success is being lucky enough to stumble upon a tractable problem?
A lot of recent math discoveries seem to be geometrical: circle packing, infinitely tiling patterns, neighbor coloring theorem, ... I don't seem to see as much discoveries in other areas like number theory, calculus, algebra etc... Is this a bias of what gets covered on HN, or are this type of geometrical problems the currently most active field of mathematics?
Aren't all those things the same ultimately?