

A story of the rise and fall of a serious attempt at a proof that P!=NP - amichail
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/what-will-happen-when-pnp-is-proved/

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endtime
A bit tangential, but...

>What is the fewest number of colors sufficient for coloring the plane so that
no two points with the same color are a unit distance apart?

For a given point P, aren't there an infinite number of points that are a
given distance from P? I.e. the points that correspond to a unit circle with
origin at P are all that unit distance from P. What am I missing here?

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sp332
Longer explanation, with pictures:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadwiger%E2%80%93Nelson_problem>

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endtime
Thanks, but as far as I can tell that still doesn't actually answer my
question.

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rottencupcakes
<http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/junkyard/geom-color.html>

Yes, there are an infinite number of points at a distance 1 from the original
point. However, that doesn't matter for the problem.

All you want to do is color regions of the plane such that, for any given
point, every point a unit away is in a different colored region.

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endtime
Ah, right. Not sure why your wording clicked for me (or, rather, I'm not sure
why I was being dense before), but makes sense now. Thanks.

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roundsquare
Hmmm, I wonder how word got out about the proof. That seems to be the big
issue.

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anshul
Pure mathematicians generally do not like secrecy. It would be just too
childish to keep such a word to oneself. They also know well to not assume the
result as proved until a refereed journal confirms it. All that would have
happened if the word got out to NYT would be a PR mess about which the
mathematical community couldn't care less.

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corecirculator
Isn't it generalizing too much? Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's last theorem
for 7 yrs in secret, nobody even knew he was working on it until he published
the results.

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gchpaco
Wiles is widely regarded as odd, to put it mildly, for that effort. And it
still didn't work and he had to get a former student in to help fix the proof.

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tjic
Fascinating.

Conventional wisdom to the contrary, it's always neat to see how sausage is
made.

This is why folks love police procedurals and forensics TV shows ... and its
extra fun when the topic is math.

