But one of the students who graduated from Malle was in the case. Britta Späth.
“Our attraction”
In 2003, Späth arrived at the University of Kassel to start his doctor's title with Malle. She is almost perfectly suited for working with McKay's speculation: even in high school, she can spend days or weeks in a single problem. He especially enjoyed those who tried his endurance, and he happily remembered the long time spent finding “tricks that, in a way, even deep.”
Späth spent his time studying group representations as deeply as he could. After he completed his graduate degree, he decided to use that expertise to continue removing the McKay's imagination. “He has crazy, really good intuition,” said Schaeffer Fry, his friend and cooperating. “He sees it will be like this.”
Quanta magazine respect
A few years later, in 2010, Späth began working at Paris Cité University, where he met the Cabanes. He was an expert in the narrower set of groups in the middle of the modified version of McKay's imagination, and the Späth often went to his office to ask him. The Cabanes are “always protesting, 'those groups are complicated, my God,'” he remembered. Despite his initial concern, he eventually grew up with the problem. It became “our obsession,” he said.
There are four categories of lies -type groups. Together, the Späth and the Cabanes began the verification of imagination for each of those categories, and they Some reported Basic results In the next decade.
Their work led them to come up with an in -depth understanding of lies -type groups. Although these groups are the most common building blocks of other groups, and therefore have a great interest in mathematics, their representations are incredible -believing difficult to study. Cabanes and Späth often need to rely on small theories from different areas of math. But in digging those theories, they have provided some of the best characterizations yet in these important groups.
As they did so, they began to date and continued to have two children. (Later they lived together in Germany, where they enjoy working together with one of the three whiteboards in their home.)
By 2018, they only have one category of lie-type groups. When it was over, they proved the McKay's imagination.
The final case lasted them for six years.
A “amazing -wonderful achievement”
The fourth type of lies group is “so much difficulty, so much bad surprise,” Späth said. . The latter case is over. It automatically follows that McKay's imagination is true.
In October 2023, they finally felt confident enough in their proof to express it in a room over 100 mathematicians. One year later, they This is posting online For the rest of the community to dissolve. “This is an absolute amazing -wonderful success,” said Radha Kessar of the University of Manchester.
