This is a great article. The writer has obviously spent a lot of time speaking to Mochizuki’s colleagues, and has explained the whole strange situation in a way that is layman-friendly without being wrong. It’s interesting that it’s part of an experiment in donation-funded journalism: I was sufficiently impressed that I donated a few dollars, but I fear that is not likely to be a common enough response to be a viable way of funding this sort of time-consuming journalism. I would love to be wrong about that.
There are interesting parallels and contrasts with Thomas Hales’s proof of the Kepler conjecture. In that case, as far as I know Hales did everything possible to help his colleagues understand the proof, but even so it was so long and involved that the referees declared themselves unable to be certain it was correct. Since then, he has been working on a formal machine-verifiable version of the proof under the banner of the Flyspeck Project: http://code.google.com/p/flyspeck/
There are interesting parallels and contrasts with Thomas Hales’s proof of the Kepler conjecture. In that case, as far as I know Hales did everything possible to help his colleagues understand the proof, but even so it was so long and involved that the referees declared themselves unable to be certain it was correct. Since then, he has been working on a formal machine-verifiable version of the proof under the banner of the Flyspeck Project: http://code.google.com/p/flyspeck/