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I don't get your point. There's a difference between an unsolved problem and an unsolvable one? That's obvious. It's also irrelevant to the story. The relevant
by gruseom 16y ago
I don't get your point. There's a difference between an unsolved problem and an unsolvable one? That's obvious. It's also irrelevant to the story.
The relevant distinction is between coursework exercises and open problems in the field. That's a pretty big difference. When students complete their homework, they don't typically get woken up by phone calls from excited professors telling them to write their work up for publication immediately.
- Retric 16y agoThe person who posted the example: presidentender I can think of one: http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp?a http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp?a Replied to my post: He was ignorant of the fact that the problems were supposed to be impossible. So he at least assumed the problem where thought to be unsolveable. As to the gap between homework and open questions in the field, it can be fairly small in mathematics when the course is on the cutting edge. The field of Statistics was a lot more open back then, and there are still plenty of subjects where the gap between cutting edge homework and original research is fairly small. PS: I once had a teacher suggest I write something up as original research as an undergraduate. The circumstances where a little different but less than you might think. It was a lecture where he was describing an algorithm and I said “that’s seems slow why not do X” but the same basic concept.