Recently, we got back several referee reports for this paper here which were quite positive (well, the comments were “the construction is genius and it works, but the exposition is quite messy”; I choose to take it as a compliment), which made me very happy because it is a very classical conjecture with some nice implications. And seeing people who took their time to understand the construction (and wade through my horrible writing, because the “messy” is certainly my fault) made me quite proud…
Speaking of, though, classical conjecture…. well one part was Oda’s. That was fine. The other conjecture we solved was “Alexander’s conjecture”, named after James Waddell Alexander. Everyone kept calling it that, and Alexander certainly worked on related problems and proved something weaker in a 1930 paper (building on work of Max Newman, who, another cool fact, is best known for becoming a codebreaker later).
For a cup of coffee more 