logoalt Hacker News

aurareturntoday at 10:05 AM1 replyview on HN

I don't understand this logic.

Ok, so unresolved math problems are often something people discover while trying to solve a different math problem.

However, math problems are really there to solve a real world problem. We have unlimited real world problems no matter how smart AI gets. Therefore, we will always have unresolved math problems.


Replies

tempfiletoday at 10:27 AM

> math problems are really there to solve a real world problem

I think this is totally wrong. Math problems are almost by definition problems with a particular theory. That theory might be inspired by the real world, but the problem itself is purely theoretical. I can't think of any theoretical problems like this that actually support a practical problem, as opposed to being an internal knot in the theory that indicates something is wrong with it. Not to say that cannot happen - certain optimization problems were historically actually hard to solve and solving them helped us to genuinely optimize a real thing (rather than just explain why the answer we already had was correct, which is much more common). In particular, none of the millennium problems have anything to do with a "real" problem, including the Navier Stokes one.

show 2 replies