Being the laziest member of the Sector, I realized that I shouldn’t try for long in depth posts because they inevitable sit unfinished in the draft stage for weeks on end until I delete them because I forgot where I was going. Since my last post, the 46th mersenne prime found by UCLA was officially announced and is a whopping 13 million digits. What is even more interesting is that it was found by a cluster of 75 XP machines magically working together without so much as a hint of BSoD.
Secondly, for those of you who aren’t readers of Slashdot, DARPA recently released a list of what they consider the 23 toughest math problems. Essentially its a call for research proposals for tough questions the average person doesn’t even know exist and have been unsolved for years (in some cases centuries). Its actually a fascinating list that also includes several of the Millenium problems (such as the Hodge Conjecture and the Riemann Hypothesis). In my opinion the most interesting of the questions are actually those that involve multiple subjects instead of pure mathematics such as the creation of scalable game theory or the creation of accurate models to predict evolving large scale networks. I’m actually excited to see what kind of results come out of the proposals because even if none of the questions are fully solved I think the initiative can still be a success by helping jump start further proposals and grants into solving these and future questions.