In 2024, a team of nine mathematicians released a monstrous, nearly 1,000 page proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture. It is a crowning achievement in pure mathematics, and I have accepted that I will never understand even the statements that they proved, much less the proof itself. On the total opposite end of the spectrum, in 2007, Robert Bridson published a one page paper that has nearly 1,000 citations and takes less than 10 minutes to fully understand. It presents a simple solution to a problem that commonly arises in computer graphics and simulations: placing things randomly, but not too close together. Say you’re trying to procedurally generate a forest and need a way to place the trees. The problem with plain random sampling is obvious: Some of the trees would be on top of each other! What we need is the ability to set a minimum distance between any two trees. A distribution of trees that obeys this rule is called a Poisson disk distribution .…