The Annals of Mathematics editors struggled to find mathematicians able to verify Hales's proof, leaving it unresolved for years.

“He dumps this proof, um, on the journal-- on the editors of the Annals of Mathematics, the most prestigious journal in the field, and they essentially don't know how to referee it, how to kind of send it out to other mathematicians to verify its correctness, and it languishes for, like, many years without actually being kind of determined true or false.”