Rumors of his proof began to circulate in March 1984, but many mathematicians were skeptical because de Branges had earlier announced some false results, including a claimed proof of the invariant subspace conjecture in 1964 (incidentally, in December 2008 he published a new claimed proof for this conjecture on his website). It took verification by a team of mathematicians at Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Leningrad to validate de Branges' proof, a process that took several months and led later to significant simplification of the main argument. The original proof uses hypergeometric functions and innovative tools from the theory of Hilbert spaces of entire functions, largely developed by de Branges.