Lol. I read that title as "Cholk and the Airplane". Cholks are the little wedges of wood/plastic, or bits of rope, put at the wheels of parked aircraft to stop them rolling away.

(Rope cholks are more cool because you can throw them as a wheel from a distance rather than climb under a wing.)

  There is no emperor distributing boons for the mathematicians of today.

There is also a subtle fatalistic fallacy at play in the author’s claims: “Progress is inevitable. This is progress. Therefore this is inevitable.”

But this doesn’t follow. We may reject this instance of progress, and allow the inevitability of progress to furnish us with another option.

This is a very weird take for an enterprise that depends almost entirely on grant money from either the taxpayer or charitable foundations.

Wasn’t reliance on oracles always going to be the endgame for mathematics (and probably physics as well)? Surely there are things we will never understand just like a dog will never understand calculus.

“… no first-rate mathematician would now work any more on it, because he would not be the first one to do it.”

That’s just a lame excuse. Once anyone does it first, no one else can. Perhaps we should ban publication, everyone can be first!