Math in the Twenty First Century

Carson Chow comments on the past and potential future impact of technology on mathematics.

Massively Multiplayer Mathematics

Although theorems are frequently named after a single person, most progress in mathematics is the result of a group effort. Recently several difficult problems in mathematics have been attacked by a collective of mathematicians that have communicated through online blogs. The immediacy of this mode of communication allowed the first proposed problem to be cracked in a surprisingly short time. Will this remain an isolated approach, or can we expect that hard mathematical problems will be regularly crowdsourced in the future?

Edelspam

This week we celebrate the 33rd birthday of spam. According to leaders in the industry virus protection and email filtering, over 90% of email traffic is taken up by spam these days. Over 99% of this 90% is no more than annoying, but there is a small portion that targets us, applied mathematicians...