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Are there any unsolved math problems that aren't proving things?
As a student in 1939, the mathematician George Dantzig once arrived late to a lecture. He mistook the unsolved problems on the blackboard for homework, and solved two of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig
> A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, Neyman just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis. I love fun stories like that. And I love that it shows this guy is crazy brilliant yet humble enough to shrug off that success and just assume he had to figure out something else for his thesis. At least that's my interpretation. faithInHumanity++;
nowadays students will just google it and see that is unsolved
Can you Google an equation?
Instructions at http://saskatoon.cs.rit.edu/min_instructions/
Sounds like homework I would ignore in favor of getting all of the more solvable homework finished :)
As a student in 1939, the mathematician George Dantzig once arrived late to a lecture. He mistook the unsolved problems on the blackboard for homework, and solved two of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig
I imagine being told that a problem is unsolved changes the way you approach it. You'll assume that 'obvious' things have been tried before. Without that psychological barrier you can try out ideas that are obvious to you that might not have occurred to anyone yet. Telling someone that a problem is unsolved implies they won't be able to solve it unless they're better than all the people who've approached it before in…
I think for most people, not knowing a problem is unsolved will lead them to try out many more approaches than if they knew. The problem is that most of the approaches will be approaches that have already been tried before and the rest will be useless. This does nothing for the solving of the problem but greatly aids your own understanding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With that in mind, what do you think is the acceptable way to get students out of the answer-getting mentality?
I think what the professor did was exactly correct, have them experience something new mathematically, but give them the heads up that they weren't (likely) to be solving it, as it's a new pattern they hadn't recognized before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did feel like it has been a waste of time. He just mixed it in with a bunch of textbook problems. It wasn't a particularly elegant or insightful, just something technical he wanted the answer to. I don't think anyone in the class got it right, as we didn't really have the tools to make progress on it. It was a first year grad class. It was one of the only times I had a really bad professor in grad school. He was vi…
Was it Jonathan Farley?
As a student in 1939, the mathematician George Dantzig once arrived late to a lecture. He mistook the unsolved problems on the blackboard for homework, and solved two of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig
I imagine being told that a problem is unsolved changes the way you approach it. You'll assume that 'obvious' things have been tried before. Without that psychological barrier you can try out ideas that are obvious to you that might not have occurred to anyone yet. Telling someone that a problem is unsolved implies they won't be able to solve it unless they're better than all the people who've approached it before in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With that in mind, what do you think is the acceptable way to get students out of the answer-getting mentality?
I think what the professor did was exactly correct, have them experience something new mathematically, but give them the heads up that they weren't (likely) to be solving it, as it's a new pattern they hadn't recognized before.
Are there any unsolved math problems that aren't proving things?