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Showing posts from September, 2017

The Twenty Grand Technical Challenges of the 21st Century

Does anyone remember David Hilbert?[0] He was the great mathematician who helped figured out how quantum mechanics worked.[1] He helped Einstein develop the theory of general relativity.[1a] In 1900 He proposed the 23 (or so) unsolved  problems of mathematics that when answered, he claimed, would lead to absolute truth for all mathematics? [2] He actually caused a revolution in mathematics and in our view of the world. He might not have liked some of the answers he got (integer mathematics cannot prove that it is consistent using only integer mathematics, but one can use infinite sets to prove integer mathematics is consistent, definitely not what he was expecting, but a fascinating answer nonetheless. Integer mathematics cannot prove itself consistent because there are an infinite number of statements about integer mathematics that are true but cannot be proven to be true using integer mathematics, which means that integer mathematics cannot be complete.) Hilbert even happened to