Re:Mathematicians Team Up on Twin Primes Conjecture
by gizmo686 on Thursday November 21, 2013 @12:05AM
(#6773146)
The difficulty with proving bleeding edge results in mathematics is normally not that the question is particularly advanced or difficult to understand, but rather that if it had an easy solution, then it would likely have been solved by now.
The only times I can think of where this is not the case is after a major, yet easy to understand, discovery makes a lot of formerly hard problem easy, or a field of mathematics that is either young enough, or uninteresting enough that it has not yet had significant time devoted to it.
This depends heavily on what you mean. Of course there are areas of math requiring ten (or more) years of study before you can work in them. However...
- In theory, all high school graduates have studied math for at least twelve years.
- There are many, many problems on "the bleeding edge" of mathematics, in the sense that no one can solve them, but which can be stated in terms an algebra student would have no trouble understanding. Further, there are many mathematical techniques which are "advanced" in the sense that they are never taught in school, but are "simple" in the sense that the algebra student I mentioned earlier would have no trouble following a proof using them. If you're interested, try reading through the archives of Tanya Khovanova's blog; she has plenty of examples of IMO problems and special Soviet math exam problems for Jews.