Busses Come In Threes, Why Do Proofs Come In Two’s?
Dick Lipton, at Gödel’s Lost Letter explores:
Why do theorems get proved independently at the same time
Jacques Hadamard and Charles-Jean de laVallée Poussin, Neil Immerman and Robert Szelepcsenyi, Steve Cook and Leonid Levin, Georgy Egorychev and Dmitry Falikman, Sanjeev Arora and Joseph Mitchell, are pairs of great researchers. Each pair proved some wonderful theorem, yet they did this in each case independently and at almost the same time.
Interesting in its own right but I mention here to raise the issue of the use to topic maps to bridge the use of different nomenclatures.
Would that increase the incidence of discovery of independent proofs of theorems?
Even harder to answer: Would bridging different nomenclatures increase the incidence of independent proofs of theorems?
Thinking that all such proofs need not be of famous theorems.
Could have independent proofs of lesser theorems as well.
The 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification is no doubt very useful but too crude to assist in the discovery of duplicate proofs (or beyond general areas to look) proofs altogether.