Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever
by John_Baez on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:42PM
(#11787166)
He didn't get into the news because he didn't solve a problem for which a famous mathematician (Ronald Graham) had offered a prize. Also, it's somewhat more exciting to use a huge calculation to answer a yes-or-no question that anyone can understand, rather than to count a huge number of fairly obscure gadgets: semigroups of size 10.
(Personally I love semigroups, and I think it's cool that you counted all the ones of size 10. But any story about them in the popular press would focus on the sheer size of the calculation rather than what it actually achieved.)
Re:Two-hundred-terabyte math proof is largest ever
by ifdefdebug on Friday May 27, 2016 @10:21AM
(#11786209)
OK, sounds interesting enough. So maybe your publication didn't make it into the news because the problem you solved didn't have Pythagoras in it's name :)
There is actually 12,418,001,077,381,302,684 semigroups of size 10. We only had to find 718,981,858,383,872 by brute force search (which still involved a whole bunch of maths and case splitting), which is 0.006% of the total. There is a whole PhD in the maths involved.
Of course, we could (and have) just published the search which has to be redone, and the maths which is required to prove the piece of search to be done.