What is the Oldest Unsolved Math Problem? 73
evilquaker asks: "After finding a reference to the (still open) odd perfect number problem, which is claimed to date back to Euclid, I wondered: what are the oldest unsolved math problems? The folklore answer is that the odd perfect number problem is the only one posed by the Greeks which is still open. However, it seems there is some doubt as to whether Euclid actually wondered about odd perfect numbers. Further, there's a claim that the twin primes conjecture dates back to the Greeks. So what's the oldest documented still-open math problem? Perhaps something about Fibonacci numbers?"
The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:2, Troll)
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:2)
Whoever modded you "Troll" is probably right. Oh well, I'll bite anyway.
If we're talking about the Jewish/Christian God (as your link seems to imply), it's a well-known fact that his name is spelled "Yohdh He' Waw He'", commonly transliterated into English as "Yahweh" or "Jehovah". This is not exactly a hidden secret.
I'm not aware of any Jewish beliefs about a 216-letter name, or even anything close to the mystical powers described in the link you gave. Methinks this is either an obscure cabbalistic fiction or the sheer invention of the screenplay writer.
Oh, and to debunk the "numerology of the Torah" stuff once and for all: although the overall message of the Hebrew Scriptures has stayed intact (the Dead Sea Scrolls, among others, verify the accuracy of the Masoretic text), the actual spelling of various words, the number of letters used, and in some cases even the exact choice of words all vary from manuscript to manuscript.
This stuff is not scientific in any sense of the word, and certainly not up to the rigors of mathematical proof.
Okay, I'll stop there... I don't want to go too far off-topic...
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:1, Flamebait)
Only if you're an idiot.
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:2)
Whoever modded you "Troll" is probably right.
I wasn't being serious. If you haven't seen the movie (about a paranoid schizophrenic who believed in all this crap), you won't get the joke.
What is the oldest unsolved math problem? I'm not about to dignify such a stupid question with a serious answer.
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:1)
Why exactly is it a stupid question?
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:1)
Why exactly is it a stupid question?
Maybe silly is a better word than stupid. It's silly because it's an arbitrary meaningless question which we almost surely won't even find the answer to.
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:1)
IOW, a perfect question for Slashdot...
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:1)
Jewish tradition uses names to refer to specific abilities, ways of reacting with the world, or attribute that the addresser is trying to manipulate.
As such, there are numerous names, of many lengths. While, I personally do not remember hearing of a 216 letter name, it would not suprise me if there was one.
or even anything close to the mystical powers described in the link you gave.
The movie was pathetic. I know some people liked it, but I consider it a waste of time. Almost everything they mentioned was some dream of the authors crazy imagination.
Methinks this is either an obscure cabbalistic fiction
You mean fictional cabbalah? Cabbalah itself, by definition ( the word literally means "acceptence" referecing traditions accepted) cannot be fictional.
Re:The oldest unsolved math problem... (Score:1)
The movie was pathetic. I know some people liked it, but I consider it a waste of time. Almost everything they mentioned was some dream of the authors crazy imagination.
I think that was the point, considering that the character clearly suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Most of it wasn't supposed to be actually happening.
Fundamentalist moderators? (Score:2)
Presumably the moderator in question didn't follow the link, or do we really have such extreme fundamentalists on /. as to be offended by a movie like Pi [filmmonthly.com]?
Re:Fundamentalist moderators? (Score:3, Insightful)
sci.math (Score:5, Informative)
It's quite an interesting read!
Hard to say since Library of Alexendria burned (Score:5, Informative)
I know you are asking for the oldest documented math problem, but do remember that the Great Library of Alexandria was burned down by an angry mob. That library housed most of the world's knowledge up until that point. So documentation of any super-old problem was probably destroyed in the fire.
By the way, a search on google for "oldest unsolved math problem" comes up with this page [newphys.se] which states
PROOF OF THE INFINITUDE OF PERFECT NUMBERS (IPN). The IPN is either the second oldest, or the oldest unsolved problem of mathematics (debatable with the No Odd Perfect Number Problem), and this proof will easily evince anyone why it is one of the two oldest unsolved math problems.
So I guess the IPN is a contender.
GMD
Yes and no (Score:4, Informative)
1) The library wasn't burned by an angry mob, it was burned accidently, by Caeser's army, when some of their missiles (launched from boats) went astray.
Very interesting. I hadn't heard that before but a quick web search led me to this page [bede.org.uk] where the authors agree with you. I had only heard the mob-burning-library-after-killing-Hypatia story.
2) Most written documentation on the "great library" suggests it wasn't a library like LoC, but more like a collection of erotic art and poems.
This statement I find no evidence for in my web search. Most everything I find (such as this [tufts.edu]) seems to suggest it was the center of learning in the ancient world as I originally posted. It's possible that the scholarly works were in the minority in the library. However it should be noted that this link [geocities.com] does describe Alexandrian literature as erotic.
It would have been nice if you had posted some links but I thank you for the clarifications in any case.
GMD
Re:Yes and no (Score:2, Interesting)
Cheers- raga
Reliving the lack of history (Score:2)
If they were so great, how come they did not have an off-site back-up policy in place?
Re:Yes and no (Score:1)
Re:Yes and no (Score:2)
Documented? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Chicken or the egg (Score:1)
Evolutionist:
Evolution takes place over centuries and centuries, the modifications to the genetic structure take place via mutations of the genes of an undevelopt offspring, and usually in the "sperm" or "egg-egg". So by this, we know that the egg came first becuase the parent of the first chicken would not have been a chicken, and the offspring of this first "chicken" would be chickens.
Creationist: Simple, God created the chicken it had sex and had babies. The Chicken came first. (Most likly the roaster and then his bitch). The chicken came first!
--
Our local Indian tribe is made up of mostly itiallian men who used to be in the Mob, before the crackdown. The Mob bosses forced the nation to change its name to "Wapaho" (Wâ~pâ~hô)
Re:Chicken or the egg (Score:1)
Re:Chicken or the egg: egg came first (Score:1)
Re:uh, /hello/. (Score:2)
For those interested, the function is:
[ (1 + sqrt(5))^n - (1 - sqrt(5))^n ]/[sqrt(5)*2^n]
Re:uh, /hello/. (Score:1)
Fibonacci died in 1250... well before the Renaissance started. The Fibonacci numbers represent the only novel mathematics I can think of that was done in the middle ages. Everything else seems to come from the Renaissance or the Greeks.
The Middle Ages? (Score:3, Informative)
Why do you think we use "Arabic numbers"?
Why do you think most stars have Arabic names?
It's unfortunate that advanced Middle Eastern culture has largely disappeared in the last millenium, and surely Europe, the New World and Far East lead the world in scientific and cultural development now, but there was a lot happening in the Middle Ages.
And let's not forget Europe. Even before the Renaissance, Europe, while certainly not advancing like it did starting in the 15th century, was hardly stagnant. Most of Western society's major secular institutions: hospitals, universities, etc, were founded in the Middle Ages.
And of course, we all know that the Chinese had many advanced developments centuries before the rest of the world (gunpowder, paper, etc).
Re:The Middle Ages? (Score:2)
Re:uh, /hello/. (Score:2, Informative)
* The Hindus knew about sine, but they didn't understand it very well and certainly didn't extend the notion to the other sides of the triangle.
Re:uh, /hello/. (Score:2)
1/0 (Score:1)
Re:1/0 (Score:2)
Re:1/0 (Score:1)
Just saying infinity doesn't tell the whole story, because the function f(x)=1/x diverges in different directions as x approaches 0. From the left, the limit is negative infinity, and from the right it is positive infinity.
Re:1/0 (Score:1)
1/0= (Score:2)
You can solve problems like 1/0 but you need to have context, numbers on there own are meaning less.
so
given 1 loaf is equivelent to 2 fishes
1 pie / (2 fishes - 1 loaf)
in just numbers becomes
1/0
but it's really
1 pie / (2 fishes - 1 loaf)
Re:1/0 (Score:1, Informative)
Re:1/0 (Score:1)
No, this means that the quantity 1/0 is literally not defined. Within the field of rational numbers (and also within the reals and complex numbers), there is no number x such that 0 * x = 1, i.e. 0 has no multiplicative inverse. For any number x, 1/x represents the multiplicative inverse of x. Since 0 has no multiplicative inverse, 1/0 is undefined.
Re:1/0 (Score:1)
Maths is all about context.
Re:1/0 (Score:1)
Re:1/0 (Score:2)
What do you mean? I can use Visual Basic's trusty console panel to figure it out.
Okay, let's see. The result is........Damned BSOD! Rats! I'll hafta get back to you on this.
Fermat (Score:1)
Captain Picard refers to it in "The Royale", so that must be 2362 or something.
The overzealous mathematician that did try to prove it a couple of years ago, almost created a time-space paradox and disaster, which was only just averted.
Luckily for the Church of Trek
"And Scotty beamed them to the Klingon ship, where they would be not tribble at all"
"All power to the Engines"
Re:Fermat (Score:2)
If you were a true Trekkie, you would know that and would have copies of the original, uncut episodes...
Re:Fermat (Score:2)
Oh, you mean Enron? It was not averted.
Beware of accountants using Calculus.
Documented problems? (Score:2, Insightful)
I seem to remember that all of the math books we have from the "Greeks" (actually, people from the east costs of the Mediterranean who happended to use some greek dialect for commercial and cultural exchanges) were meant to show results, not problems: most of them are some sorts of summae where somebody expose everything that is known about some subject, with more or less comments and precisations. Some of them actually include what probably were original results of the authors, but always as facts, not problems.
So, if we look back to greek times we can't have documented problems, but only problems that could have been asked with their knowdlege, expecially if it's similar to some problem they actually solved. If we accept this kind of problems, I believe that the existance of infinite perfect numbers could be a good candidate, as the Greek knew about them, and actually worried about the existence of infinite numbers of other kinds (prime, etc.).
If, on the other side, you want actual written documentation about the problem, I'm afraid that either we find some fragment of a letter written by some greek or arabian mathematician (quite unlikely) or we have to focus on renaissance.
Anyway, I'm not sure that problems with fibonacci numbers actually date to Fibonacci's era, as i seem to remember that they were only a small part of his work, and that they were extensively studied only later (by some 1800 French matematician?)
Re:Documented problems? (Score:1)
Even so, it seems strange that they wouldn't indicate what definitely isn't known about a subject, to differentiate it from what is known but not said (because something will always be left out). Perhaps that's a modern development, though...
Re:Documented problems? (Score:1)
I think it is a modern developement: in ancient times people actually believed that one could write everything about a subject without leaving anything, probably also because in most disciplines people knew much less than we do today (and as a matter of fact many people succeded in gaining an almost complete knowdlege of disparate disciplines, without our need to specialize).
Another possible reason is that we consider books to be a way to communicate ideas between contemporary people, so that knowdlege can be shared and used; in ancient times I believe that books were meant more for posterity than for their contemporaries, as most people who studied some subject tended to live in the same place (Alexandria, in a certain period), so they probably foud easier to share their knowdlege between themselves orally.
=o) (Score:1)
depends a little on what you mean by `unsolved' (Score:1)
Re:depends a little on what you mean by `unsolved' (Score:1)
Something for nothing (Score:1)
Why can't we apply this to solve our financial dire strait?
has to be said (Score:1)