“We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that.”
A 17-year-old disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a problem that stumped mathematicians for 40 years. She built a counterexample showing the conjecture was simply wrong. Her proof also torpedoed related conjectures in harmonic analysis. Sometimes the best math isn’t proving something true. It’s proving everyone else was barking up the wrong tree.