Introduction The week before Christmas 2025, five mathematicians were holed up in a classroom at ETH Zurich. The mood was electric: They were this close to a career-defining breakthrough. The group — consisting of then-postdocs Sahar Diskin and Philip Easo, graduate student Ritvik Ramanan Radhakrishnan, Benny Sudakov, and Vincent Tassion — was perfecting a solution to one of the biggest open problems in percolation theory, the study of flow in a network. Percolation captures a vast array of phen...