Another Millenium Problem May Have Been Solved

S3D writes "After recent verification of the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, another of the Clay Institute's Millenium Problems may have been solved. This new solution is for Navier-Stokes equations under physically reasonable conditions. Navier-Stocks equations describe the motion of fluid substances such as liquids and gases. Penny Smith has posted an Arxiv paper entitled 'Immortal Smooth Solution of the Three Space Dimensional Navier-Stokes System' which may prove the existence of such solutions."

Comments

Hm.

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I have no idea what any of that means, but rest assured that by the time this thread ends I will have developed ironclad opinions on the subject.

LOUD ones.

Re:Hm.

[arun_s]

I have a truly remarkable proof that will convince you, but the dang lameness filter is getting in the way.

Quite impressive

[adityamalik]

As a mechanical engineer, I have some idea of what this means.. Fluid dynamics is a fairly pervasive subject which goes into the design of airplanes, irrigation canals, industrial machinery, turbines and a lot of other places. The solution of the navier stokes' equation in three dimensions is quite fabulous, since without such a mathematical tool it's not possible to estimate how a fluid will flow in three dimensions.. Till now, we typically use either special conditions (ex. along a turbine blade, constant pressure) or fractional element methods (think of fluid as lots of tiny balls) or physical modelling for such problems. To put some perspective, it's about as cool as being able to determine the movement of n planets simultaneously attracting each other gravitationally.. quite tough!

Re:Quite impressive

[S3D]

That is not "the solution" of the Navier-Stocks system - they could be solved only numerically (fractional element methods or other discretization), but this is the next best thing - proof of the existance of such solution. From the practical point of view that mean, if you have correct physical starting conditions and working numerical method you will get correct result after calculation. Until now, you couldn't have been sure if you will get physyically reasonable result of numerical calculations, even if starting conditions would be correct.

Re:Quite impressive

[vogon jeltz]

Correct,
it's about the existence of a solution for certain boundary / initial conditions of the NSEs. This is still a very big deal because you can now expect correct results when doing numerical calculations. By the way you probably meant FEM (Finite Element Method), not "fractional element methods". FEM is rarely, if not at all used for solving the NSEs, you'd rather use Finite Volume Methods (applicable for structured and unstructured grids, as are FEM).

Whuh?

[LiquidEdge]

Man, I haven't had a date in like 4 years, and even *I'm* not nerdy enough to know why this matters...

An important step

[Orp]

As a previous commenter stated, this is a mathematical proof that such a solution exists. You cannot explicitly solve the Navier Stokes equations as written. If you could, my job would be much easier (I model thunderstorms at very high resolution on massively parallel supercomputers). The Navier Stokes equations, along with some other conservation laws, and some physical parameterizations, can be "closed" such that you can approximate a solution using numerical tehcniques, given an initial state and boundary conditions. It is not easy. From a practical standpoint, dealing with massively parallel computers is not much fun. I've spent the past couple of months debugging my own stupid coding errors, competing with hundreds of other scientists running their models, and finding ways to manage the terabytes of data these models produce when they do run succesfully.

Back to the paper... While I am not a mathematician, the paper appears kind of rough to me - lots of punctuation errors, commas in the wrong place, unclosed parehtneses... I suspect this paper has not been fully through the peer review process. I don't know how the mathematicians do it, but I would say this paper is a draft (not discrediting the work - I am not quallfied to judge it - but it looks rough).