Its authors - Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken - would credit an unconventional collaborator: a computer had done much of the mathematical heavy lifting, 1,200 hours of compute and 10 billion decisions to be exact.
Appel and Haken would later describe how the system “began to teach us things about how to proceed that we never expected”, conceding that the system had “surpassed its creators” in certain intellectual tasks. A brave new world of man-machine mathematics had begun, begging a question: are we to trust a mathematical proof is too vast for any human to verify?
Reactions from mathematicians ranged from acceptance, to rejection and even denial - rather than universal adoration. Mathematicians - who pride themselves on rationality - were suddenly confronted with a mathematical moloch in what must have felt like irreligious heresy.
