A quick primer on the news about Rishi Rajpopat's thesis
There’s been a lot of media buzz lately about an “Indian PhD student at Cambridge University” solving a “2,500-year-old Sanskrit puzzle”. Here are a few examples of recent press coverage—The BBC, The Hindu, Indian Express. If you’ve read one you’ve read them all because they are basically all copy-pastas of each other. Unfortunately the coverage is pretty scant on details, so I thought I’d provide a quick primer for those interested in understanding what the whole thing is about.