> The solution for these irreducible representations came to Raskin at a moment when his personal life was filled with chaos. A few weeks after he and Færgeman posted their paper online, Raskin had to rush his pregnant wife to the hospital, then return home to take his son to his first day of kindergarten. Raskin’s wife remained in the hospital until the birth of their second child six weeks later, and during this time Raskin’s life revolved around keeping life normal for his son and driving in endless loops between home, his son’s school and the hospital. “My whole life was the car and taking care of people,” he said.
> He took to calling Gaitsgory on his drives to talk math. By the end of the first of those weeks, Raskin had realized that he could reduce the problem of irreducible representations to proving three facts that were all within reach. “For me it was this amazing period,” he said. His personal life was “filled with anxiety and dread about the future. For me, math is always this very grounding and meditative thing that takes me out of that kind of anxiety.”