Imagine this scenario: Scientists have intercepted a transmission from an alien race. It's clear that the message comes from an intelligent being, but everything about it — the syntax, the grammar, the context — is unintelligible to us Earthlings.
That's how most mathematicians feel about the Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory (IUT), a proof introduced by mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki over a decade ago in an attempt to solve the famous ABC conjecture, one of the most famous unsolved problems in number theory, which deals with the sum of prime numbers and has implications on many other conjectures.
