←back to thread

Big advance on simple-sounding math problem was a century in the making

(www.quantamagazine.org)
97 points isaacfrond | 1 comments | 15 Oct 24 13:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
nomilk ◴[15 Oct 24 16:30 UTC] No.41850289[source]▶
How do mathematicians come to focus on seemingly arbitrary quesrions:

> another asks whether there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by only 2, such as 11 and 13

Is it that many questions were successfully dis/proved and so were left with some that seem arbitrary? Or is there something special about the particular questions mathematicians focus on that a layperson has no hope of appreciating?

My best guess is questions like the one above may not have any immediate utility, but could at any time (for hundreds of years) become vital to solving some important problem that generates huge value through its applications.

replies(12): >>41850407 #>>41850513 #>>41850594 #>>41850601 #>>41850607 #>>41850643 #>>41850663 #>>41850700 #>>41851013 #>>41851247 #>>41852106 #>>41855465 #
1. ykonstant ◴[15 Oct 24 17:05 UTC] No.41850643[source]▶
The answer is historical evolution. To you, the problem may appear arbitrary, like physicists studying some "obscure phenomenon" like the photoelectric effect may have seemed to outsiders. But (far, far) behind the scenes, there is a long and winding history of questions, answers and refinements.

Knowing that history illuminates the context and importance of problems like the above; but it makes for a long, taxing and sometimes boring read for the unmotivated, unlike the sexy "quantum blockchain intelligence" blurbs or "grand unification of mathematics" silliness in pure math. So, few popularizations care to trace the historical trail from the basics to the state of the art.