Timeline for Examples of notably long or difficult proofs that only improve upon existing results by a small amount
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
27 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 18 at 16:05 | comment | added | Aditya Guha Roy | I think the best examples could be the papers which find the n-th digit of pi or e. Nevertheless they are important but the amount of new details revealed seems like an injustice to the amount of work that goes in these papers. | |
| Jan 18, 2019 at 3:58 | answer | added | Todd Trimble | timeline score: 9 | |
| Jan 14, 2019 at 21:57 | comment | added | Tadashi | Related to the Moving sofa problem, Lebesgue covering problem. | |
| Jan 7, 2019 at 13:40 | history | protected | CommunityBot | ||
| Sep 12, 2018 at 1:13 | answer | added | Yonatan N | timeline score: 26 | |
| Sep 10, 2018 at 7:32 | answer | added | Kostya_I | timeline score: 13 | |
| Sep 8, 2018 at 10:34 | answer | added | Wolfgang | timeline score: 8 | |
| Sep 7, 2018 at 22:31 | comment | added | BigM | And why such an improvement is "highly important"? or you were being sarcastic? | |
| Sep 7, 2018 at 19:52 | answer | added | Igor Rivin | timeline score: 8 | |
| Sep 7, 2018 at 16:57 | answer | added | tparker | timeline score: 63 | |
| Sep 7, 2018 at 1:22 | answer | added | Michael Renardy | timeline score: 9 | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 16:38 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | How about large prime gaps? Gerhard "LogLogLog N Is Often Small" Paseman, 2018.09.06. | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 15:59 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by S. Carnahan♦ | ||
| Sep 6, 2018 at 15:10 | answer | added | Wojowu | timeline score: 41 | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 13:57 | comment | added | Ben Burns | I'm not qualified to post an answer, but I think there are many such examples in combinatorics, depending on what you mean by "notably long or difficult." For example, pulling one of the first paper's from Radziszowski's Small Ramsey Number survey (pdf), Angeltveit and McKay's paper at arxiv.org/abs/1703.08768 checks ~ two trillion cases with a computer program to improve a bound by 1. | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 13:29 | comment | added | Steve Huntsman | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_sofa_problem | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 13:03 | comment | added | Will Brian | This answer of John Baez seems relevant: mathoverflow.net/questions/31315/…. I'm not sure if any of the proofs he mentions are notably long or difficult, but this problem seems to have an interesting history of mathematicians making microscopic improvements on what was known before. | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 12:01 | comment | added | Francesco Polizzi | @Christopher: well, with this definition Viazovska's achieved the 100% of what remained to be done | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 10:36 | history | edited | Klangen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 5 characters in body
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| Sep 6, 2018 at 10:32 | comment | added | Christopher | @FrancescoPolizzi It might be better considered as "a small amount of what remains to be done" rather than "a small amount of what was needed to be done at the start". So your Poincare example is 100% of what remained to be done, whereas the example in the question is ~0.3%. | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 9:25 | answer | added | Fedor Petrov | timeline score: 59 | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 8:50 | answer | added | Federico Poloni | timeline score: 94 | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 8:43 | answer | added | user74900 | timeline score: 41 | |
| Sep 6, 2018 at 8:32 | comment | added | Francesco Polizzi | It is really difficult to answer without a precise definition of "small amount". Let me give a provocative example. It was well known that the Poincare' conjecture hold in every dimension different from $3$. Then Perelman came with his very difficult proof in the case of dimension $3$, and clearly a single case can be seen as a "small amount" when compared with infinitely many :-) | |
| S Sep 6, 2018 at 8:27 | history | suggested | user57432 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Added link of the paper
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| Sep 6, 2018 at 8:24 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Sep 6, 2018 at 8:27 | |||||
| Sep 6, 2018 at 8:16 | history | asked | Klangen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |