Re: The Wearing O' the Orange

David G. Bell <dbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
dd-b@xxxxxxxx "David Dyer-Bennet" wrote:
The "Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture" (or I've seen it
hyphenated, but then it looks like three people if you don't know).
But yes, that's him. A fairly major figure in modern math. My
father knew him somewhat -- distant family connection and all, and
my father was a math prof (but not a researcher, after his thesis).

Can anyone give a useful summary of what that's about?

I don't expect it's as simple as Fermat's Last Theorem, and look at
the math that was needed to prove that.

You're right. But there are still simple problems that are unsolved.
For instance the Goldbach conjecture: Is every even number greater
than 2 the sum of two primes? Or an algorithm to efficiently factor
large numbers; you can win over half a million dollars by finding
one (Google on "RSA Challenge"). Or finding a point in the plane
that's a rational distance from all four corners of a unit square
in the same plane, or proving there isn't one. Or whether there's
an odd perfect number. Or whether there's a highest Mersenne prime.

If you want to know what the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer
Conjecture is about, I recommend starting with Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_and_Swinnerton-Dyer_conjecture
which has the advantage that the terms you might not know all
link to pages which explain what they mean, and so on recursively.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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