Even though Albert Einstein's theory of relativity has been talked about for more than a century, quite a part of it has not yet been proved. One of the intriguing questions followed a space which was almost all vacuum with a tiny amount of mass in it. Would it necessarily be almost flat? Conghan Dong (a graduate student at Stony Brook University) and Antoine Song (an assistant professor at the California Insitute of Technology) recently stated that a space with smaller and smaller amounts of mass won't show overall any curvature and the space would be in fact flat. I think this proves that even in modern days the exploration of the world stands on the efficiency of mathematicians who still play a vital role.
I recommend reading the whole article to find out how exactly Dong and Song proved their paper: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-century-later-new-math-smooths-out-general-relativity-20231130/
