The Clay Institute Prize

My assistant Mina Varsani explains how
to become a millionaire the hard way.

Following Andrew Wiles’s astounding achievement in solving Fermat’s Last Theorem, the race has been on to find a new contender for the most challenging problem in mathematics. The prime candidates have included the Poincare and the Hodge conjectures, both of which have remained unsolved for many years. Perhaps the most famous candidate is the Riemann Hypothesis, a problem first published in 1859. Nearly a century and a half later, these three problems, along with 4 others, have been judged by Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) to be so notorious that that there is a $1 million reward for each problem solved dead or alive.

In his famous lecture of 20th August 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert announced 23 outstanding problems he believed to be of importance in the development of mathematics. In honour of Hilbert’s lecture, the Millennium Mathematics prize was announced at a meeting of the CMI in May 2000, exactly 100 years later.

The problems were chosen for their longevity and their resistance to previous attempts to solve them. The seven problems are: The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, the Hodge Conjecture, Navier-Stokes Equations, P vs. NP, the Poincare Conjecture, the Riemann Hypothesis and the Yang-Mills Theory.

Unsurprisingly, none of the seven problems are expected to be solved in the immediate future. Hence the lack of a deadline for this competition.  Rather, the problems have been created to promote a wider interest and appreciation of mathematics, as well as providing inspiration for a future Andrew Wiles.

If you think you are up for the challenge, you can find out more here.