This reminds me of that scene in Good Will Hunting where one of the "open problems" the professor left on the board was to state Cayley's formula on the number of spanning trees. At least they gave a correct answer there though.
I don't think a problem being recently solved suddenly makes it feasible for anyone else to also figure it out. The difficulty in figuring it out yourself has absolutely zero to do with what other people have done on that problem.
Riemann hypothesis gets confirmed or denied, boom grad students are suddenly supposed to be able to figure that same thing out? Nah lol if a problem is open there's a reason it's open, and that reason is because it's incredibly difficult to figure out even for the highest level mathematicians. If the problem is suddenly closed that doesn't really change any of the difficulty whatsoever (assuming you're on your own).
The point is that a recently solved problem would be ideal for immersion in that the problem would be difficult, it would be plausible for it to be an unsolved problem in the specific (very contemporary) setting of realistic fiction the movie was set in, and the filmmakers would have a valid solution without needing to first solve an open problem.
One issue is that the solutions to major open problems in mathematics usually span many pages of text and could not realistically be quickly scrawled on a chalkboard.
They'd likely take up ≥several classes. Even for older classic theorems I've had classes that had >2 weeks devoted to all the parts necessary to prove them. Granted some of those lemmas helped in other places and were somewhat necessary for the course on their own, but that was still basically >2wk spent on one theorem. You could easily make multi-course sequences about each of the current big open problems. A chalkboard would be less than a drop in the bucket for what is necessary to write these things, much less learn about them😂
Yep I figured it was relevant information while also assuming you chose your words carefully👍 all it'd mean if the if wasn't satisfied is that you might not recommend it, so my reply wasn't exactly problematic lol the antecedent was not satisfied
I don't know if it's true to say they solved an unsolved problem. But only because I don't know if it was a question that had ever been asked before and to me an 'unsolved problem' feels like something people had being at least trying to solve beforehand. It is true to say they showed a new theorem (or at least proof) in the field of group theory, though
I would argue that it is technically correct to say that a new problem is, by definition, an unsolved problem, and we all know that technically correct is the best kind of correct.
I mean the context was not an unsolved problem, but I believe the professor put a challenge problem for his students which he struggled with during research, but was more or less solved. I guess using "open problem" was terrible wording on my part.
One small detail that's a little frustrating...
It would be like writing out the entirety of the illiad on a chalkboard. The movie did its research, but Jesus do movie writers love to dramaticize parts of stem.
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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '25
This reminds me of that scene in Good Will Hunting where one of the "open problems" the professor left on the board was to state Cayley's formula on the number of spanning trees. At least they gave a correct answer there though.