Comment by terminalbraid
2 days ago
> Is it all on computers now?
Most modern math is certainly not "all on computers" and in general not even "mostly on computers". There are definitely proofs for things like testing large spaces exhaustively which are sped up by computers (see the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem) and definitely for things like visualization (probably one of the oldest uses of computers for math), but usually the real work goes into how math has always been done: identifying patterns and abusing symmetries.
For this one explicitly, if you read through the paper you'll find the statement that the main theorem presented here "does not depend on any computer calculations. However, we have made available files with explicit coordinates for our kissing configurations"
It really depends though. Even in something like knot theory, that one might consider to be a very "pure" area, there's still a lot of computation involved that can be automated by computers.