2年前のQuoraにあったコメントの一部。 Here is somewhat loose analogy: Faltings, Soule and Gillet (plus many others like Deligne) worked in Arakelov theory during 1980s. The goal was to prove the effective Mordell conjecture. The culminated amount of papers eventually reached over 500 pages by the beginning of 1990s. Most of the papers are rather hard to read line by line. This school of ideas failed; no one was able to prove effective Mordell or ABC conjecture using Arakelov theory. However a lot of byproducts were produced in the process of developing the theory: The theory of Faltings height and the proof of average Colmez conjecture is a recent example. If Mochizuki’s theory is successful, it should have non-trivial applications besides proving ABC conjecture. Many of the practioners in this field have written very long papers to attack ABC conjecture and spent comparable time on the topic as Mochizuki. If these people cannot appreciate his ideas, it would be very, very hard to “sell” the work to the wider mathematical community.
