Answer by bof for Proofs of theorems that proved more or deeper results than...
In the paper P. Erdős and A. Hajnal, On the structure of set-mappings, Acta Math. Acad. Sci. Hungar.9 (1958), 111-131, the authors came close to solving Ulam's measure problem by proving that the first...
View ArticleAnswer by André LFS Bacci for Proofs of theorems that proved more or deeper...
How about this? It's short, it's sweet and is happening now.Jacob Holm was flipping through proofs from an October 2019 research paper he and colleague Eva Rotenberg—an associate professor in the...
View ArticleAnswer by Yly for Proofs of theorems that proved more or deeper results than...
Euler apparently discovered the formula for what we now call Fourier series, and thereby could have initiated Fourier analysis, without recognizing its significance. I learned about this from...
View ArticleAnswer by Atnas for Proofs of theorems that proved more or deeper results...
Here is an example of this happening in 2019.This article describes what happened.We had nearly given up on getting the last piece and solving the riddle. We thought we had a minor result, one that was...
View ArticleAnswer by Timothy Chow for Proofs of theorems that proved more or deeper...
The example given by Wojowu in the comments seems worth posting as an answer.In the NOVA special The Proof, Ken Ribet says the following.I saw Barry Mazur on the campus, and I said, "Let's go for a cup...
View ArticleAnswer by Patrick Lutz for Proofs of theorems that proved more or deeper...
In theoretical computer science, an extractor is an algorithm that takes a weak source of randomness (i.e. a distribution that may be far from the uniform distribution) and produces a much stronger...
View ArticleAnswer by Sam Hopkins for Proofs of theorems that proved more or deeper...
In his 1955 paper "Invariant of finite groups generated by reflections" Chevalley gave a uniform proof the the Chevalley-Shephard-Todd theorem which says that for a finite group $G$ acting on a complex...
View ArticleAnswer by user44143 for Proofs of theorems that proved more or deeper results...
Henri Poincaré provides an example in mathematical physics, as discussed by Thibault Damour and Howard Stein.Poincarésaid in June 1905:The essential point established by Lorentz is that the...
View ArticleAnswer by Firestone for Proofs of theorems that proved more or deeper results...
I hesitate to offer an example from two millennia earlier than you have requested, but perhaps it may qualify as surely having passed unnoticed by many thousands of students. Euclid's proof of the...
View ArticleProofs of theorems that proved more or deeper results than what was first...
Recently, I figured out that a colleague of mine has had published during recent years a proof of a theorem in which he was actually proving a deeper result which we both thought to be still open....
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