Anyone who doesn't believe there is creativity in mathematics clearly has not tried to write proofs. Finding a way to convince the world that a particular statement is necessarily true is a mighty undertaking and can often be quite challenging. There is not a guaranteed path to success in the search for proofs. For example, in the summer of 1742, a German mathematician by the name of Christian Goldbach wondered whether every even integer greater than 2 could be written as the sum of two primes. Centuries later, we still don't have a proof of this apparent fact (computers have checked that “Goldbach's Conjecture” holds for all numbers less than \(4\times 10^{18}\text{,}\) which leaves only infinitely many more numbers to check).
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