It is then that we leave her on the brink of uttering new words that we hope will re-engage the microphones progressive linguistic potential. A child slips into the room and picks her way through the residue to rescue the microphone abandoned on the floor. Following the historic mic drop we witness the literal ‘end of the party’, the left over-debris of an aborted moment of celebration. The recognition of these symbolic ramifications of the dropped mic, seems to have only more recently recognised by the Obama Foundation in their ‘Pass the Mic’ video of January 2017. This theatrical severing of Obama’s oratory, with all of its linguistic flair, poetically colliding the professorial with the presidential, with the vernacular, was, unbeknown to us at the time, symbolic of a deeper and more pernicious severing of the advance of progressive and liberal ideas that had at long last delivered a Black US Presidency, and would in many minds go on to inevitably deliver a female one. "In conclusion, Soergel's conjecture is true".Therefore in April 2016, when Barack Obama ended his final address to the White House Correspondents dinner with his gesturally knowing ‘Mic Drop’ accompanied by the words ‘Obama Out’, only in retrospect do we begin to recognise the symbolic significance of this moment. The talk is quite technical, involving a lot of quite deep ideas and descriptions of how certain geometrical ideas, such as Hodge theory, can be given more algebraic analogues and how these may be put together to make progress on the conjecture.Īs is typical of any technical talk, it is very hard to keep track of all the details and how they fit together along the way, so he provides a nice summary in the end: He then goes on to describe Soergel's conjecture and some of the ideas that he and Ben have been working on, hoping to make progress on the conjecture. He starts his talk by apologizing that he is in fact going to talk about a completely different topic, since he had very recently finished some work on this with his collaborator Ben Elias. I can unfortunately not recall the precise topic, as I can no longer find the program for the conference. Note however, that other participants may have experienced these things differently, since they will have had a better background knowledge of the topic.Īt a conference in Uppsala in September 2012, Geordie Williamson was scheduled to give a talk. I think the following anecdote fits well in this category.
Watson and Crick's famous ending of their DNA paper, "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material," has a bit of the same understated feel. What are other noteworthy examples of such announcements in math that are, in some sense, memorable for being understated? Say to an outsider in the field? As close to a literal "mic-drop" as I can think of, after noting in his 1993 lectures that Fermat's Last Theorem was a mere corollary of the work presented, Andrew Wiles famously ended his lecture by stating "I think I'll stop here.".I think the story is noteworthy also because Johanne Bernoulli is said "recognized the lion by his paw." In 1697 Newton famously offered an "anonymous solution" to the Royal Society to the Brachistochrone problem that took him a mere evening/sleepless night to resolve.In 1976 after Appel and Hakken had proved the Four Color Theorem, Appel wrote on the University of Illinois' math department blackboard "Modulo careful checking, it appears that four colors suffice." The statement "Four Colors Suffice" was used as the stamp for the University of Illinois at least around 1976.Other examples that come to mind include: Nor was there any indication that the cubes actually sum to $33$, apparently leaving it as an exercise for the reader. However the homepage had merely a single, austere line, and did not even indicate that this is/was a semi-famous open problem. The very recent example that inspired this question: But as an outsider I appreciate the understated manner in which some results are dropped. I think that most mathematicians as a whole, even upon solving major open problems, are an extremely humble lot. Oftentimes in math the manner in which a solution to a problem is announced becomes a significant chapter/part of the lore associated with the problem, almost being remembered more than the manner in which the problem was solved.
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