Overview

After 150 years of work capped with several decades of intense effort, mathematicians were able to demonstrate that they had classified all mathematical entities known as finite simple groups. This proof was the longest ever completed, consisting of more than 500 scientific papers that filled over 15,000 pages in mathematical journals. The proof, in final form, was over 5,000 pages in length. Mathematics' acceptance of this proof, which will likely never be reviewed in its entirety by a single person, marked an interesting change in the manner in which increasingly complex research is performed and accepted by the scientific community.

Background

In 1980 Ohio State University mathematician Ronald Solomon completed work on a mathematics problem that had begun in 1832 with a mathematics paper that was rejected by the French Academy of Sciences. The author of this...