The Millennium Problems

About this book

In 2000, the Clay Foundation announced a historic competition: whoever could solve any of seven extraordinarily difficult mathematical problems, and have the solution acknowledged as correct by the experts, would receive 1 million in prize money. There was some precedent for doing this: In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert proposed twenty-three problems that set much of the agenda for mathematics in the twentieth century. The Millennium Problems--chosen by a committee of the leading mathematicians in the world--are likely to acquire similar stature, and their solution (or lack of it) is likely to play a strong role in determining the course of mathematics in the twenty-first century. Keith Devlin, renowned expositor of mathematics and one of the authors of the Clay Institute's official description of the problems, here provides the definitive account for the mathematically interested reader. [Review by David Roberts, on 02/7/2003] In May 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute elevated seven long-standing open problems in mathematics to the status of "Millennium Prize Problems," endowing each with a million-dollar prize. The seven particular problems were chosen in part because of their difficulty, but even more so because of their central importance to modern mathematics. The problems and the corresponding general areas of mathematics are as follows. 1) The Riemann Hypothesis - Number Theory 2) Yang-Mills Existence and Mass Gap - Mathematical Physics 3) The P versus NP problem - Computer Science 4) Navier-Stokes Existence and Smoothness - Mathematical Physics …

Themes & subjects

About the author

Keith J. Devlin

16 March 1947

Keith J. Devlin is a mathematician and popular science writer. *--Wikipedia* *--Photo Attribution:* Richard Ressman, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons