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corollary-sniping love

corollary-sniping

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  • alexz commented on the word corollary-sniping

    Spotted a free range definition at https://cp4space.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/simultaneous-proofs/


    † Corollary-sniping is a rather impolite and dishonourable practice in which one jumps on a big theorem proved by someone else, and proves one or more corollaries using it. For instance, if someone suddenly exclaimed “Hence Fermat’s Last Theorem!” just as Andrew Wiles proved the necessary cases of the Tanayama-Shimura conjecture, that would have been an epic case of corollary-sniping (if that happened, hopefully the prize would still have been awarded to Wiles). An actual instance was when Xia’s proof that particles can be projected to infinity in finite time under Newtonian gravity was famously corollary-sniped to deduce that the n-body problem is undecidable."

    </i> there's a 1971 citation on page 152 at https://books.google.ca/books?id=ZHwOAQAAMAAJ 

    March 11, 2016