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[Image] [image source: parents.com] For Berta’s mother, the first kick already made clear that her daughter was extraordinary: “This wasn’t just any odd kick, it was a p-wave cross-correlation seismogram.” But this pregnancy exceeded even the most enthusiastic mother’s expectations. Still three months shy of her due date, fetus Berta just published her first paper in the renown mathematics journal “Reviews in Topology.” And it isn’t just any odd cohomological invariance that she has taken on, but one of the thorniest problems known to mathematicians. Like most of the big mathematical puzzles, this one is easy to understand, and yet even the greatest minds on the planet have so far been unsuccessful proving it. Consider you have a box of arbitrary dimension, filled with randomly spaced polyhedra that touch on exactly three surfaces each. Now you take them out of the box, remove one surface, turn the box by 90 degrees around Donald Trump’s belly button, and then put the polyhedral back into the box. Put in simple terms this immediately raises the question: “Who cares?” Berta’s proof demonstrates that the proposition is correct. Her work, which has been lauded by colleagues as “masterwork of incomprehensibility” and “a lucid dream caught in equations,” draws upon recent research in fields ranging from differential geometry to category theory to volcanology. The complete proof adds up to 5000 pages. “It’s quite something,” says her mother who was nicknamed “next Einstein’s mom” on Berta’s reddit AMA last week. “We hope the paper will be peer reviewed by the time she makes her driver’s license.”