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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.
These are really hard problems and I wonder how does anyone formulate a research grant requests for them.
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.