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Cash for Math: The Erdős Prizes Live On
- melling 9y agoHopefully the remaining money is in an index fund and growing. Larger amounts of money could then be offered. At the very least it could keep pace with inflation. Can donations be made?
- oldbuzzard 9y agoFrom the article, I think the "remaining money" may be entirely notional. It talks about Ron Graham chipping in $5k to help cover a $10K bounty. Besides, these days the money is mostly beside the point. It is like those Knuth reward checks, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check. In most cases, certainly the most recent $500 "happy ending" problem, the bragging rights are worth more than the money.
- MichaelBurge 9y agoI've often thought about setting up a semi-automated "theorem bounty" site for formal proofs. Besides prizes for new or big discoveries, it'd also be a good way to fund formalizing e.g. undergraduate textbooks on Ring Theory.
- chriswarbo 9y agoThere is (was? site doesn't seem to load for me..) a "bitcoins for formal proofs" site called Proof Market https://slawekk.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/proof-market https://slawekk.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/proof-market Theorems and proofs can be given in Coq or Agda format. If they pass the language's checker, bitcoins are dispensed.
- Sniffnoy 9y agoMore open problems in math with monetary rewards attached can be found here: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/66084/open-problems-with-monetary-rewards https://mathoverflow.net/questions/66084/open-problems-with-...
- relyks 9y agoDo any of the unsolved problems have any practical applications? Could solutions lead to other results?
- analog31 9y agoOne thing I've noticed is that some of the great problems, such as Fermat's Last Theorem, spawned entire fields of math, from which applications may have developed. It wouldn't shock me if some advances in cryptography were spinoffs of progress in pure math. Then there's the prize for progress towards understanding the Navier-Stokes equation of fluid dynamics.
- msds 9y agoIt would shock me if any significant advances in cryptography weren't progress in pure math.
- torrent-of-ions 9y agoThe answer to both is quite possibly, but we don't know. History has seen many mathematical curiosities gaining important practical applications, sometimes hundreds of years later. Indeed, much of computer science is based upon mathematics which was at one time impractical. A good example is strong encryption, the foundations for which were built long before we had machines that were able to implement it.