Slashdot Mirror
The 23 Toughest Math Questions
coondoggie sends in a Network World post that begins "It sounds like a math phobic's worst nightmare or perhaps Good Will Hunting for the ages. Those wacky folks at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have put out a research request it calls Mathematical Challenges, that has the mighty goal of 'dramatically revolutionizing mathematics and thereby strengthening DoD's scientific and technological capabilities.' The challenges are in fact 23 questions that, if answered, would offer a high potential for major mathematical breakthroughs, DARPA said." Some of the questions overlap with the Millennium Prize Problems of the Clay Mathematics Institute, which each carry a $1M prize.
..and most of the challenges have little to do with math. Meanwhile, here's something which could lead to real progress in mathematics (From the Slashdot Firehose):
An anonymous reader writes:
link
They are asking the reader to create entire fields! how lazy of them.
Encouraging someone to do something stupid doesn't actually change the fact that it's stupid though :)
"I'm a mathematician-in-training and I've just finished an MSc. It's so depressing to see that mathematics has been turned in the last 50 years from a way of expanding the mind and as a tool for scientific discovery to a channel for
(1) optimising wealth generation on the gambling paradise they call the stock market; and
(2) invading privacy to ensure those who have won the gamble get to keep their hardly-earnt gains."
I'm also a mathematician in training, having finished an MSc. I'm about to start a PhD working on (1). I assume (2) is a reference to the study of cryptography. Studying wealth-generation techniques does not make me power-hungry or greedy, in the same way that the people working on the Manhattan project were not monsters who wanted to extinguish life.
I'm not doing this out of personal greed, I'm doing it because the mathematics involved is elegant and interesting.
Maybe you're happy working away on your abstract nonsense, but I think I'd prefer to work on something which might actually make a difference to people's lives. Just because an application has potential for abuse doesn't make it inherently evil, as you seem to suggest.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
How about we use the correct term and call it what it is: legislation.
...and yes, I expect to get modded down just because the video is clearly pro-McCain.
Congress didn't "encourage" subprime lending. They required it. (please excuse the McCain propaganda in this video...not meant to be political but it has some very relevant facts to the question at hand)
Doesn't anyone remember "redlining" mortgages from the 80's and 90's? Here is some background info. Read the part about mortgages.
Congress reacted to this by legislating subprime lending and requiring banks to provide X% of their loans to people who probably should not have gotten them.