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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.
Surely there are enough nerds on slashdot to figure these out. Or are we not as smart as we say we are?
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
These are really hard problems and I wonder how does anyone formulate a research grant requests for them.
I wonder if it's just coincidence that the number of problems they list is the same as the number of problems David Hilbert listed in his famous address in 1900. And well, the Riemann Hypothesis is there too. A hundred years later, and still no resolution.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Unsure...
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Speaking as one who trained as a cryptologic technician interpretative (Mandarin Chinese) in the US Navy, I'd say the NSA has a lot to do with the DoD. So much of the NSA's manpower consists of active-duty soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. NSA facilities are located at army and navy bases worldwide.
You also have the problem of whole fields of research popping up which depend on defense money, and then shrink once the DoD shifts its priorities. I specialize in a few minority languages of Russia. Back during the Cold War, the relevant linguistics department at Indiana University Bloomington got a tonne of funding from the Air Force because its work could be connected to Soviet areal studies. Once 1991 and the fall of the USSR came along, most of the funding dried up and most jobs were lost. They never saw a need to always keep up to date with other sources of funding, and now Uralic and Altaic studies in the US are a shadow of what they once were, with European universities outclassing them.
Speaking as a former airmen with a very similar past, aren't we not supposed to speak about that? EEFI?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Apparently, according to Google this is a pretty dang hard question to answer:
Yep, google breaks!
So the DoD just leaked that they already know the solution to that one. Interesting.
As a math student...
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.
True, but what the GP seems to be getting at is, if scientists in general and mathematicians in particular would think about the potential ethical ramifications of their work before doing it, perhaps the world would be a nicer place. A philosophy I'd tend to agree with, BTW, specially with regards to the US' NSA and DoD.
I'm not doing this out of personal greed, I'm doing it because the mathematics involved is elegant and interesting.
Best of lucks, then, and I hope I ever get the chance of looking at your work, the math involved *does* sound interesting from what little I've seen.
Maybe you're happy working away on your abstract nonsense
You just *had* to ruin a perfectly good comment by flaming anyone who thinks differently than you do.
but I think I'd prefer to work on something which might actually make a difference to people's lives
Perhaps you should've gone into engineering, then?
Just because an application has potential for abuse doesn't make it inherently evil, as you seem to suggest.
True, but I'd be careful when dealing with the US government. That paranoid theory that the NSA has already broken most encryption algorithms but just hasn't disclosed how yet, sounds a bit less paranoid once you see how many mathematicians are employed by them, and it's better to be safe than in Gitmo.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
OK. What I can see is a man who decided to work on a bomb because he wanted to be able to bomb Hitler before Hitler could bomb US. Not just for the love of physics involved, but mainly for strategic reasons. I sure didn't read the whole thing, but whatever I found supports my position.
Actually, geeks are the ones writing the movies. What you are hearing is those values coming out of very highly-paid mouthpieces. Y'see, we already hold these values true to our hearts, so when we hear what we're already thinking come back to us out of Matt Damon or Brad Pitt's mug, of course we're going to latch on to it, and repeat it when appropriate, as it is in this case.
If anything, the point that is being made by most of these geek-cred-laden messages is that we really should think twice before succumbing to the consumer-addicted mainstream message being espoused by NASCAR-watching, Walmart-shopping popped-collar-wearing frat-boy retards who go on to hold political positions that they got because of their fathers and uncles who were not only legacy members of the frat, but legacy members in the businesses and also our government. These are usually official jobs that we would do much much better jobs of if we didn't see the entire political process as selling out by going to work for the Evil Empire.
"Tak[ing] whatever message, philosophy, bullshit [that] is sold to them as long as it's entertaining" fits the guys playing Madden '09 while wearing a WWE tshirt a lot better than it does actual geeks.
But you know all that already, considering this is a geek blog, and you wouldn't be here if you didn't already consider yourself a geek. ...so the only REAL question is: why all the self-hate, brah? You know we love you.