alt Hacker NewsSure, even a 20% chance at 1 million payday after 5-6 years of fulltime work on a project with zero practical application doesn't touch the, say, 200k/year guaranteed our best mathematicians would have to forgo to devote their intellect to the problem.
Replies
jampekka • today at 7:46 PM
Thousands of some of the brightest minds have worked on this problem for over a century. The million bucks is not the big deal here.
superxpro12 • today at 7:45 PM
i wonder how many tokens it takes to run 10,000 agents? One could argue this is simply a problem of appropriations. I find myself wondering if a corporation could spend $5M on mathmeticians and arrive at the same end result.
Are these mutually exclusive? Why would you have to forego that salary to work on this problem? This is one of the most prestigious and meaningful problems in all of mathematics, which is why it has such a high prize amount attached to it - why would a university not support a mathematician working on such a prestigious and important problem in lieu of something else?