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I also share the frustration! I THINK I have finished, but this was beyond obscure to a non-mathematician. And can someone confirm that it is necessary to alter letters in the two rows which are not part of the surname or title, in order to keep real words in the grid? I am definitely not a Poat fan, having fallen foul of the infamous hare a few years ago.

eenk - you only adjust entries in the two rows containing the title and author

It is only necessary to alter letters in the two rows to keep the grid free of non-words or phrases, eenk. But the alterations need to be thematic. In other words, letters may be altered which are not then highlighted

sorry eenk - I misread your post. Ignore me as I wasn’t particularly helpful ;)

Thanks for the replies. Just to be clear, I have altered letters in both the two rows which contain the name and title, but which are not part of the name or title, in order to leave the grid with real words. These alterations are not, in themselves, thematic.

Eenk, if you have made the correct alterations and understood the theme, which you should have to get this far, then they will be thematic as far as the row entries are concerned. Obviously any down entry with one altered letter will not be thematic. By “thematic” I assume you mean a seven letter singular noun. I can’t say any more without spelling it out

Dodgepot,

Thanks for trying to help, but I now wonder if I am barking up totally the wrong tree. I have an Italian mathematician, (not one that I had ever heard of), name in row x and title of work in row y. I can change the other letters in these rows to leave real words all round, which seems to meet the requirements as set out, but I cannot for the life of me see that the resulting across entries are thematic (except that they contain the 15 cells to be highlighted). Perhaps I need to go and lie down!

Eenk, no problem. Take the right hand answer in row x as an example. If the modified answer you have in that space in the final grid is correct, it will be thematically related to your original answer. The same will be true of the left hand answer in row x (in this case a phrase) and the two answers in row y.

You’ve already “similarly adjusted” all the remaining clues as per the preamble

Many thanks, dodgepot. My grid is all correct, but I had not spotted that last feature.