the direct summand conjecture, part of the homological conjectures in commutative algebra, was first proposed by mel hochster in 1973. the conjecture is easily proven when the given ring contains a field, but the ``mixed characteristic'' case seemed, for the most part, impenetrable. in 2016 yves andre announced a proof of the conjecture which utilizes the theory of perfectoid spaces. we will attempt to give a (somewhat) detailed proof of the dsc in a simplified scenario, and then give a general idea of the methods used to prove the theorem in the general case.