3 ms·
Fantastic read. The OP does a great job of describing how gradual progress occurs in mathematics. Thank you for sharing this on HN. Deep down, I'm still hoping
by cs702 8mo ago
Fantastic read. The OP does a great job of describing how gradual progress occurs in mathematics. Thank you for sharing this on HN.
Deep down, I'm still hoping someone or something will find a beautiful proof that is more elegant than brute-force counting and verifying that four colors suffice for all unavoidable configurations that reduce to all other possible configurations. According to the article, there are 633 of those configurations. No idea if a more elegant proof is possible, but I hope it is.
- efavdb 8mo agoAgree 100% -- wonderful history here. And with such a simple statement, hard to believe / accept the "reason" is that it works for 633 limiting cases.
- nine_k 8mo agoAs somebody noticed, we're very lucky to live in a universe where many key things are utterly simple (like basic arithemetics), or allow for acceptable simple approximations (like classical mechanics). There was a sci-fi story set in a world orbiting a binary star, where discovering the laws of celestial mechanics feels like an intractable problem, and even predicting seasons is barely possible.