To be fair, results like this are very improbable to come from someone who is not a full-time mathematician. And no that does not mean someone working in machine learning or someone who did their PhD 6 years ago. How many such results do you see from someone who is not a full-time mathematician?

It is possible for someone who is not a full-time mathematician by still working on mathematics in their spare time or in a mathy-field in their day job but very very few real examples of that can be found.

So I don't find the title clickbaity. It is really really hard to come up with results like this without working on mathematics research (not AI research) 10 hours a day!

Totally agree. I did a PhD in Pure Math. 6 years later I could no longer give anything but a superficial explanation of my own thesis. Now ~15 years later my thesis is totally impenetrable to me. Advanced math is a house of cards that quickly falls if you're not actively reinforcing it.

The article also notes that other mathematicians very quickly advanced his work from 10% to 38% and wondered why he hadn't just done it himself, since it was relatively simple. He explained that his skills were rusty after being out of mathematics for six years.