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Friday, April 01, 2016

3 Billion Years Old Math Problem Solved by Prodigy Fetus

[image source: parents.com]
For Berta’s mother, the first kick already made clear that her daughter was extraordinary: “This wasn’t just any odd kick, it was a p-wave cross-correlation seismogram.” But this pregnancy exceeded even the most enthusiastic mother’s expectations. Still three months shy of her due date, fetus Berta just published her first paper in the renown mathematics journal “Reviews in Topology.” And it isn’t just any odd cohomological invariance that she has taken on, but one of the thorniest problems known to mathematicians.

Like most of the big mathematical puzzles, this one is easy to understand, and yet even the greatest minds on the planet have so far been unsuccessful proving it. Consider you have a box of arbitrary dimension, filled with randomly spaced polyhedra that touch on exactly three surfaces each. Now you take them out of the box, remove one surface, turn the box by 90 degrees around Donald Trump’s belly button, and then put the polyhedral back into the box. Put in simple terms this immediately raises the question: “Who cares?”

Berta’s proof demonstrates that the proposition is correct. Her work, which has been lauded by colleagues as “masterwork of incomprehensibility” and “a lucid dream caught in equations,” draws upon recent research in fields ranging from differential geometry to category theory to volcanology. The complete proof adds up to 5000 pages. “It’s quite something,” says her mother who was nicknamed “next Einstein’s mom” on Berta’s reddit AMA last week. “We hope the paper will be peer reviewed by the time she makes her driver’s license.”

8 comments:

  1. This looks like a departure from the usual style of the blog :)
    I liked it, especially the ending!

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  2. "... the big mathematical puzzles ..." Is there a mathematical unification of algebraic geometry with string theory?
    The law of conservation of gravitational energy is false! Newton's 3rd law of motion is false! Newton's law of gravity is false! Einstein's equivalence principle is false! Einstein's field equations are false! ... April Fool or perhaps not ...

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  3. So much potential in physics (science in general) for April fools. Like the vacuum energy! Endless! But you are the first out the gate S.H.! At least on G+

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  4. "M-theory makes prediction" J. Emetica et Enuretica Acta 42(4) 696 (2016)

    The Harvard University Department of Social Justice Physics today vowed to replace European-descended patriarchal oppressors with spectrally diverse superposed-gender Standpoint theorists after revoking tenure from 23 full professors whose observations were contradictory.

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  5. Wonderful, now i KNOW I'm too old to make any breakthroughs! It used to be before 40, then thirty, and now it's apparently before birth😄

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  6. Excellent Sabine, just excellent.

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  7. "Wmo cares?"
    The correct answer used to be "42".

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  8. the index for gushing praise on this blogger has now surpassed everything except the index of imminent threat facing the Belgian people. An April Fools is measured by Fooling. April Irony does Irony but that's not till October.

    ReplyDelete

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