Status Updates From Visions of Infinity: The Gr...

Like several of the millennium problems, the Birch—Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is difficult even to state{}However, it rewards perseverance, because along the way we start to appreciate the depths, and long historical traditions of number theory. If you look carefully at the name of the conjecture, one hyphen is longer than the other.It is not something conjectured by mathematicians named Birch, Swinnerton,and Dyer,

But the disaster in which the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff caused this plan to be abandoned, because the Centaur-G was prohibited. So Galileo had to use a weaker solid fuel booster instead. The mission was a huge success, and the scientific payoff included observing the collision between comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Jupiter in 1994, while the probe was still en route to Jupiter.