How a Reading Group Argument Turned Into a Paper

! These are Demo Pages. We were arguing about whether a well-known result actually holds outside its original setting. Nobody could settle it in the room, so three of us agreed to check.This is, in retrospect, how most of my favorite projects have started — not from a literature gap, but from an argument nobody wanted to lose.

Two months later we had a small but clean counterexample, and six months after that, a paper. The full result is on the Publications page; this post is about the parts that did not make it into the paper.

What didn’t make the paper

The first two weeks were spent chasing a much stronger claim that turned out to be false. We kept the failed proof attempt as a sanity check for the eventual write-up, which is the only reason the final argument is as tight as it is.