The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the mathematical realm known as group theory. At first her goals were relatively modest: She hoped to prove a theorem or two that would make incremental progress on the problem, as many other mathematicians had done before her. But over the years, she was drawn back to it, again and again. Whenever she tried to focus on something else, she said, “it didn’t connect.”
There was a risk that such a single-minded pursuit of so