There were a ton of challenges, says Kittur, in trying to keep the system organized.
Kittur thinks the reason why collaborations like the Polymath Project haven’t become mainstream is because it was “a bit of a perfect storm” it came together at a time when people happened to be experimenting with different forms of communication and collaboration on the internet. HOW THEY STAYED CONNECTED - Niki Kittur, a professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, co-authored a paper in 2011 with his colleague, Justin Cranshaw, in which they took apart and inspected the internal cogs of the Polymath Project, deciphering what were the ingredients that made the recipe work. “Doing this has helped increase my own mathematical confidence.” “I originally didn’t think that anything unsolved was at all approachable,” Jason Dyer, a math teacher in Arizona who contributed to some of the project’s problems told New Scientist. THE TEAM - The experience levels of contributors ran the gamut anyone from Fields Medal winners to interested amateurs (including a high-school teacher, a priest, and a math graduate student). Gowers remarked that “this process is to normal research as driving is to pushing a car.” A paper was published on the online preprint server arXiv, under the collective pseudonym D. The first problem proposed was a mathematical theorem known as the density Hales-Jewett (DHJ) theorem, a puzzle Gowers wrote he himself would “love to solve.” The problem was a tricky one it was known to be true, but Gowers challenged his readers to try to find a more straightforward proof than ones that had been put forward in the past.īy March - some six weeks and 800 comments later - a new proof of the theorem had been found. “Also, if the collaboration took place openly, then there would be little danger of being scooped, since it would be clear where the ideas had come from.” “The idea had been in the back of my mind for some time that, if a lot of people all thought about a single problem, then perhaps it would be more efficient in some ways than one or two people doing so,” Gowers tells Inverse. Anybody was welcome to participate, and he christened the experiment the “Polymath Project.” He proposed an unusual experiment, using his blog as a medium, and issued an open invitation for others to contribute to unsolved math problems that he would set forth.
#POLYMATH INNOVATIONS CRACK#
THE DREAM - In a blog post in January 2009, Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge and a fellow Fields Medalist, asked whether online collaborations could work together to crack difficult mathematical problems - and whether they could do it faster. In fact, its success suggests that strength in numbers may be the key to better mathematics. The Polymath Project tossed this idea in the trash. History has long idolized the idea of the loner mathematical genius, working quietly away on problems with nothing more than a piece of chalk and his blackboard. “People usually framed the check instead.” “It was traditional to not actually cash the prizes that Erdős did award while he was alive,” Tao told Nature. When asked if he would accept the prize money, Tao remained bashful. A 10-year-old Tao met Erdős when he visited Australia, and Erdős, who died in 1996, would go on to write a letter recommending Tao for admission to Princeton University. at 20, was granted tenure at 24, and won the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, at 31. Tao, considered one of the world’s greatest living mathematicians, earned his Ph.D. Tao proposed a solution to the problem, a combination of his own work, along with some of the arguments proposed by contributors to the Polymath Project. Then, on September 17, 2015, Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, posted a paper to the preprint server arXiv.
Not even computerized attempts could topple the problem. It was the collaboration's fifth project. No one had even come close.Īn attempt to solve the problem resurged again in 2010, this time led by the Polymath Project, a collaboration of mathematicians, both amateur and professional, who work together to solve math puzzles. Called the Erdős discrepancy problem, a puzzle that surmised the properties of an infinite, random sequence of +1s and -1s, it remained unsolved for more than eight decades. In the early 1930s, the renowned Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős set forth a puzzle.Įrdős offered $500 to anyone who could crack it.