Timeline for No starter "accessible" well known open problems
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
26 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 13 at 11:56 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | There has been a lot of discussion about the P = NP problem, but has there actually been any progress? | |
| Jun 12 at 15:19 | answer | added | JP McCarthy | timeline score: 1 | |
| Apr 18 at 1:40 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | @DavidWhite there might be some overlap. However, my main point is the no starter. So I would like problems that lots of very good people thought of and lot of people found interesting, but there was no progress whatsoever. I hardly know problems like this and I wonder, why? | |
| Apr 17 at 13:05 | review | Close votes | |||
| Apr 18 at 6:34 | |||||
| Apr 17 at 12:46 | comment | added | David White | How is this question different from: mathoverflow.net/questions/100265/… | |
| Apr 15 at 15:43 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | @StanleyYaoXiao this, in one direction, implies that the two generated Burnside group for p=5 is infinite. I believe this is studied. Also Tarski monster are well studied and people do improve the bound. | |
| Apr 15 at 13:39 | comment | converted from answer | Stanley Yao Xiao | Are there any Tarski monsters for $p = 5$? | |
| Apr 15 at 13:32 | history | edited | YCor | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
removed capitals from title
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| Apr 15 at 12:08 | answer | added | Sam Hopkins | timeline score: 4 | |
| Apr 15 at 1:27 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | @bof the book was written 5 years before I was born and Littlewood actually died when I was 10. So no wonder I never heard him talking about his disbelief in the Riemann Hypothesis. :-) | |
| Apr 15 at 0:45 | comment | added | bof | @YiftachBarnea I'm not a number theorist and have no opinion on the matter. In another comment you wrote "I never heard anyone saying they believe it is false" so I thought you might be interested in the opinion of a great mathematician. | |
| Apr 15 at 0:27 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | @bof I am not a number theorist, but from my general knowledge I believe there is evidence. However, this is really not relevant to the question, so I will leave it to the experts. | |
| Apr 15 at 0:00 | comment | added | bof | @YiftachBarnea "I believe this to be false. There is no evidence whatever for it (unless one counts that it is always nice when any function has only real roots). One should not believe things for which there is no evidence. In the spirit of the anthology I should also record my feeling that there is no imaginable reason why it should be true." — "The Riemann Hypothesis", an essay by J. E. Littlewood in the anthology The Scientist Speculates which can be borrowed from the Internet Archive.: archive.org/details/scientistspecula0000irvi/page/n5/mode/2up | |
| Apr 14 at 21:28 | answer | added | Yemon Choi | timeline score: 4 | |
| Apr 14 at 12:11 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | @YemonChoi not really what I had in mind, because there are many papers and ideas on the topic, although of course contradicting ones. So indeed no-one knows what the answer is. I am more interested in those where clearly the question is very interesting very natural, but no-one knows how to even start approaching it. I guess most of them would be, does such an object exist? | |
| Apr 14 at 4:50 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | For instance, I am not sure that anyone really has any idea about how to prove (non-)amenability of Thompson's F, but does that really count as the kind of problem you are looking for with this question? | |
| Apr 14 at 4:49 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | I think I have examples in functional analysis that might count, although I am still not sure how many papers need to be written on an open problem before it is a non-example of what you are looking for | |
| Apr 13 at 1:35 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | @GerryMyerson I think I saw a lot of activity around it in the last several years (I think Tao had some work on it). I think also people solved some cases and also looked at variation on it, but this something I am far from sure of. | |
| Apr 13 at 0:03 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | Seems to me that no one has any idea how to start solving the $3x+1$ problem, aka the Collatz problem. Certainly easy to state, well-known, and open. | |
| Apr 12 at 16:28 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Todd Trimble | ||
| Apr 12 at 15:25 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | Anything is possible, until there is a proof, and I am not a number theorist, however, I never heard anyone saying they believe it is false (possibly some are not 100% sure it is true). In any case, it is exactly the opposite kind of problem than then ones I am looking for. | |
| Apr 12 at 15:07 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | Many experts think the Riemann Hypothesis could be false! | |
| Apr 12 at 15:02 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | To many of these famous open problems people have or had ideas how to make progress or they proved special cases or they reduced them to other problems. I am talking about problems that no-one has any clue how even to start. No-one wrote a paper about them, no-one conjectured (not guessed) what the answer. Everyone "knows" that the Riemann Hypothesis is true, we just don't know how to prove it. For the problems I have mentioned, I don't think anyone has even a belief what is the correct answer. | |
| Apr 12 at 14:40 | review | Low quality posts | |||
| Apr 12 at 16:34 | |||||
| Apr 12 at 13:34 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | I don't understand the distinction you are making in your first two paragraphs. Generally for all very famous open problems no one has a clue how to solve them - otherwise they would have. | |
| Apr 12 at 13:26 | history | asked | Yiftach Barnea | CC BY-SA 4.0 |