As an antidote to the overwhelmingly depressing news of the world, I highly recommend reading the new article in the New York Times about this mathematical result.
There have been some articles about this earlier in places like Scientific American that emphasized the role of Joan Birman, who is still active at 99. I’ve been hearing from Joan regularly over the past few years about this project, and she always described it to me as largely the work of a talented young woman mathematician, Vasudha Bharathram. The New York Times story does a great job of explaining the story of this remarkable collaboration.
