Timeline for What is the oldest open math problem outside of number theory?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
34 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 20 at 7:12 | answer | added | smalldog | timeline score: 3 | |
| Sep 15 at 22:56 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 8 | |
| Sep 14 at 20:06 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 15 | |
| Sep 14 at 16:04 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | Are there any problems about Latin squares / finite projective planes going back to Euler that are still open? | |
| Sep 14 at 15:40 | review | Close votes | |||
| Sep 16 at 14:21 | |||||
| Sep 14 at 13:08 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 12 | |
| Sep 14 at 12:28 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Sep 14 at 12:27 | answer | added | Francois Ziegler | timeline score: 26 | |
| Sep 14 at 10:52 | comment | added | Martin M. W. | Gauss was tabulating knots in 1794. I'm not familiar with his notebooks, but I wonder if he explicitly asked about the efficiency of knot recognition methods? | |
| Sep 14 at 10:11 | answer | added | fedja | timeline score: 34 | |
| Sep 14 at 9:07 | history | edited | Timothy Chow | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Added link to duplicate question on HSM
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| Sep 14 at 8:17 | history | reopened |
Moishe Kohan Fedor Petrov Carlo Beenakker Alex M. Qiaochu Yuan |
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| Sep 13 at 22:59 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @FedorPetrov Again I think you make a good point in the abstract, but my feeling is that for this particular question, the chances of getting a much better answer on MO are not very high. It's a soft question, and the nature of the question is more suited to HSM than MO. But, I suppose the community might feel differently and vote to reopen. | |
| Sep 13 at 22:54 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @user509184 Well, Mark Lewko has specifically excluded "so-and-so surely would have considered X after studying Y". | |
| Sep 13 at 21:58 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Sep 14 at 8:26 | |||||
| Sep 13 at 15:23 | comment | added | user509184 | @TimothyChow 1882 is pretty good but I think it ought to be possible to find something earlier. I have read that Riemann first introduced Riemannian manifolds, although not with modern standards of rigor, in 1854. Surely the problem of classifying Riemannian manifolds must have been asked shortly thereafter--to me it seems the problem suggests itself as soon as you see the definition. Of course the problem of classifying manifolds (incl. Riemannian manifolds) in various families is a huge problem, and actively worked on today. | |
| Sep 13 at 14:46 | history | closed |
Federico Poloni Gro-Tsen Timothy Chow LSpice Daniele Tampieri |
Not suitable for this site | |
| Sep 13 at 14:11 | comment | added | Fedor Petrov | @TimothyChow If it is properly answered on HSM, then it can be closed as a duplicate, but I have doubts about this. Many questions from Math.se are duplicated here if they do not get an answer there, why should it be different with HSM? | |
| Sep 13 at 12:54 | history | edited | LSpice | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
TeX -> ASCII quotes
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| Sep 13 at 12:38 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @FedorPetrov In the abstract I agree with you, but the existing HSM question is morally speaking a duplicate of this question, and only technically speaking not a duplicate because HSM and MO are technically different sites. I don't see that anything is gained by taking advantage of this loophole to post a duplicate here on MO. Any good answers can be appended to the existing HSM question. | |
| Sep 13 at 12:29 | comment | added | Fedor Petrov | @FedericoPoloni if mathematicians are not against to see such questions, then why not? History of mathematics is intimately related to mathematical research: every research paper has historical part; the high interest to history of mathematics is much more natural for mathematicians then to anybody else, and it can teach us a lot. The same concerns philosophy of mathematics, teaching mathematics and other things mathematicians have a natural interest in. | |
| Sep 13 at 11:53 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | @FedorPetrov I don't find this a convincing argument, personally. There are many people who would love their questions to be seen by a community of professional mathematicians, but this does not make their questions automatically on-topic here. But I know my opinion is not shared by everyone; this has been discussed on meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/4566 and meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/394 . | |
| Sep 13 at 11:51 | comment | added | Tom | In 1887, Kelvin asked the question for three-dimensional space: how can space be partitioned into cells of equal volume with the least area of surface between them: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/… | |
| Sep 13 at 11:41 | comment | added | Will Brian | The oldest still-open problem in set theory post-dates Hilbert's list, so it's not the answer to this question. But if you're interested, here's a link to a blog post (written by Asaf Karagila, whom you may recognize from MO) explaining the problem and some of its history: karagila.org/2014/on-the-partition-principle | |
| Sep 13 at 11:18 | comment | added | Fedor Petrov | @FedericoPoloni I am not sure. I expect that there exist many mathematicians who can answer questions like this and who are active rather on MO than on HSM | |
| Sep 13 at 11:06 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak |
edited tags
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| Sep 13 at 9:34 | review | Close votes | |||
| Sep 13 at 14:46 | |||||
| Sep 13 at 9:32 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | @MarkLewko True, but still I think that this question belongs on History of Science and Mathematics. | |
| Sep 13 at 9:27 | comment | added | Mark Lewko | @FedericoPoloni: I think that's a fair vote, and I'll happily defer to our governance processes. To be a bit pedantic, though, that question asked for problems greater than 200 years old and essentially didn't find one. Here we certainly should be able to a identify a problem of maximum age here (which people will likely update over time if/when they stumble on better examples). | |
| Sep 13 at 9:12 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | I’m voting to close this question because it has already been asked on hsm.se, where it is more on-topic | |
| Sep 13 at 7:27 | comment | added | Mark Lewko | It does seem surprisingly hard to locate problems predating 1900. Once you get to 1900 you can sort through Hilbert's problem list. I've seen multiple sources say Navier-Stokes predates this, but I don't know enough about the problem or its history to assess how fair it is to date, say, the Clay formulations back that far. | |
| Sep 13 at 6:52 | comment | added | Mark Lewko | @CarloBeenakker: thanks for the link (which I was not aware of)! That said, its hard to extract even a candidate from the discussion there that isn't (1) solved, (2) outside the given definition of number theory, or (3) whose formulation date is undisputed. | |
| Sep 13 at 6:30 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | see hsm.stackexchange.com/q/14748/1697 | |
| Sep 13 at 6:01 | history | asked | Mark Lewko | CC BY-SA 4.0 |