albin james’s Reviews > Visions of Infinity: The Great Mathematical Problems > Status Update
albin james
is on page 278 of 352
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,
— Aug 22, 2020 05:24AM
1 like · Like flag
albin’s Previous Updates
albin james
is on page 248 of 352
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.
— Aug 21, 2020 03:22PM
albin james
is on page 211 of 352
Given an algorithm, is there a proof that it either stops, or a proof that it must go on for ever? Turing’s surprising answer was `no’. For some algorithms no proof either way exists. The P/NP problem could, perhaps, be like that. It would explain why no one can either prove it or disprove it. But no one can prove or disprove that the P/NP problem is undecidable, either. Maybe its undecidability is undecidable...
— Apr 17, 2020 09:47AM
