13.0505 open questions in the disciplines

From: Humanist Discussion Group (willard@lists.village.virginia.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 23 2000 - 08:25:34 CUT

  • Next message: Humanist Discussion Group: "13.0506 Foucault on Loyola? Cicero, de finibus?"

                   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



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 23 2000 - 08:41:45 CUT