The Oracle of Arithmetic Works Best Without Writing Down a Thing

In 2010, a startling rumor filtered through the number theory community and reached Jared Weinstein. Apparently, some graduate student at the University of Bonn in Germany had written a paper that redid "Harris-Taylor"--a 288-page book dedicated to a single impenetrable proof in number theory--in only 37 pages. The 22-year-old student, Peter Scholze, had found a way to sidestep one of the most complicated parts of the proof, which deals with a sweeping connection between number theory and geometry. "It was just so stunning for someone so young to have done something so revolutionary," said Weinstein, a 34-year-old number theorist now at Boston University. Mathematicians at the University of Bonn, who made Scholze a full professor just two years later, were already aware of his extraordinary mathematical mind.