Want to Take On An Open/Unsolved Problem?

CexpTretical writes "The accumulation and focusing of knowledge may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet. There are plenty of open or unsolved problems left for this generation. Why not spend some of your time in the dark of this winter working on one of the big problems facing humanity? Open problems exists in almost every field of study. Wikipedia maintains a small list of them and at least one international group called the Union of International Associations maintains a database of open problems." Which problem do you want to see cracked first? Are you already working on one of these big issues?

Comments

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

[syousef]

This kind of work is not something you take on by looking it up on a general encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. If you're at a point where you can actually make an attempt on such a problem, you're probably already familiar with specialist literature and you more likely than not have heard of the problem long ago and not yet tackled it.

This would be a better place to start:
http://arxiv.org/

If you can't even understand the papers here in the field you've chosen, you've got a lot of work to do and it may even be easier to pursue it formally as part of a postgrad degree.

The myth that you can just walk into a problem and solve it is rubbish. Einstein may have been a patent clerk when he had his breakthrough "miracle" year but he was looking at problems for many many years and got to know a lot of mathematical and scientific literature in a less than formal setting which is one reason he was able to see past all the old thinking and realise that things he was seeing (notably the Lorentz transformations/Michelson-Morley experiment) were literally true.