Millennium Problems

The Millenium Problems are a set of seven problems for which the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a <dollar/>7 million prize fund (one million per problem) to celebrate the new millennium in May 2000. The problems all have significant impacts on their field of mathematics and beyond, and were all unsolved at the time of the offering of the prize.

The seven problems are the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, the Hodge Conjecture, the Navier-Stokes Equations, P versus NP, the Poincaré Conjecture, the Riemann Hypothesis, and the Yang-Mills Theory. In 2003, the Poincaré Conjecture was proven by the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman.

History

Announcement

The millenium problems were first announced at Millenium Meeting on May 24, 2000 at the Collège de France. Timothy Gowers first presented a lecture titled The Importance of Mathematics as an introduction. After this, the British mathematician Michael Atiyah and the American John Tate announced the prize: one million dollars to anyone who could solve one of the seven most difficult open problems at the time.

A small committee of mathematicians, selected by the scientific advisory board of the CMI, had selected the problems over the previous several months. They were led by Arthur Jaffe, the first director of the CMI, the former director of the American Mathematical Society, and the incumbent of the Landon Clay Chair in Mathematics at Harvard University. This committee included such luminaries as Andrew Wiles, the aforementioned Atiyah and Tate, the American Edward Twitten, and the French Alaine Connes.

References

• Devlin, Keith J (2003). Basic Books. The Millennium Problems. ISBN 978-0465017300.

External Links

• Millennium Prize Problems at Clay Mathematics Institute