Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 505.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 08:19:34 +0000
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Cards on the Table
Dear Colleagues:
Stephen N. Matsuba of the University of Waterloo replied to my recent
indirect call for listing 20 main open questions in each (academic)
discipline with some interesting points and a list of 7 questions in
literary and linguistic studies (see volume 13, no. 501).
I will match him by listing 7 main open questions in mathematics in the
last 5 years, as I do below. I will list another 7 as soon as somebody
lists 7 others in another or the same field.
1. rare events/large deviations, 2. nonsmooth analysis (broken graphs,
graphs with holes in them, graphs with sharp point turns, etc.), 3.
solutions/approximations of Navier-Stokes equations in
hydrodynamics/aerodynamics, 4. solutions of Schrodinger equation, 5.
solutions of Einstein field equations, 6. topological control theory, 7.
algebra of nonnegative semigroups and non-Hilbert Banach spaces.
By the way, Waterloo University, McGill University, and Montreal/Quebec are
3 of the best universities of Canada, which in my humble opinion puts them
somewhere between Harvard-Yale-Princeton and Oxford-Cambridge-London on the
scale of great universities. I mention this because I have a conjecture
concerning the greatness of universities being positively correlated with
their age with obviously a fair number of exceptions. I may say something
about this later if I can avoid insulting half the researchers in the world.
Yours,
Osher
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