The unsolved math problem

http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp?

by edw519 • 18 years ago

31 14 18 years ago

huhtenberg2• 18 years ago

How is this relevant to Hacker News ?

dreish• 18 years ago

It's inspiring to think that people can do more than they're expected to be able to do if they just don't know what that limit is.

A lot of people around here are trying to push themselves pretty hard, and appreciate the inspiration. (This one has popped up before, though.)

aquateen• 18 years ago

I had seen it a long while before, but it's interesting.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

Let me see... it's a classic story about a fascinating event in the history of a field that many people here find interesting and/or have studied. It's about a creative breakthrough that came about in an unanticipated, nonstandard way - something very much in the hacker ethos. It's information that many of us would never have run across if it hadn't been posted here (if it was posted before, I missed it). It even has a cameo by Knuth!

The story is in fact so relevant to Hacker News that it would be hard to imagine anything more in the spirit of the site.

The only thing lame about it is the title. The problems were obviously not unsolvable.

Edit: while I'm at it, a lot of people here are students, or were recently students, or are lifelong students. Many have spent time in the academic milieu described in the story and are familiar with this kind of folklore. The meme of the math professor assigning unsolved problems as homework is a familiar one.

wallflower• 18 years ago

I like the one about the professor accepting the excuse of the students who missed the final exam by saying they couldn't make it - car troubles. And the professor let them retake it - and the exam was one question: "Which tire?"

I want to build a spam filter that would throw out email based on some measure of its content relative to Snope's DB score.

huhtenberg2• 18 years ago

Sure, yeah, there's a Ferma's last theorem as an "extra hard exercise" in Knuth, a story of Huffman and his codes, device for thin shaving IC for the purpose of cloning them, etc, etc

It's all part of a standard CompSci folklore package. If you dig into Math or Physics folklore, there's even more stories. In fact, there are thick books filled with them. But do you seriously want to see them on a front page ? I can assure you many of them inspiring and a lot of them are far more "in the spirit of the site" than this one.

agentbleu• 18 years ago

ignorance is truly bliss

edw519• 18 years ago

Reminds me a little of the story of the fleas. They can normally jump 3 ft, but when the are put in an 18" high container with a lid, they can never jump more that 18" for the rest of their lives, even when the lid is removed.

Sometimes I wonder how much I let the rest of the world turn me into a flea.

aneesh• 18 years ago

Indeed, students and younger academics are often the ones making the breakthroughs, simply because they don't know what's "unsolvable".

rguzman• 18 years ago

This is true in some instances, but not generally. I think most advances are made gradually by very experienced people who understand exactly why things are "unsolvable" and what paths may be more fruitful.

Secondly, it is doubtful that a student will solve a millennium problem or make any other advance of that caliber.

The unsolved math problem

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