In high school, I had a brilliant geometry teacher who would give us a test every Friday. At the end of these tests, he would place an incredibly hard geometry problem, and if you solved it, he would give you a bar of chocolate on Monday. While many of my classmates were worried about the test on Friday, I could not wait for it.
Attaching rewards to difficult math problems wasn’t original to my geometry teacher. In the year we accept as the millennium, US-based Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) revealed some of the most difficult unsolved mathematics problems at a Paris conference and attached a 1 million dollar prize to each.
Exactly 100 years before the said conference, again in Paris, renowned mathematician David Hilbert released a list of 23 prechosen math problems, inviting all mathematicians to a great challenge. That challenge was met with great reception, and the answers to those problems shaped mathematics in the 20th century. You can find the list of Hilbert’s problems here.Twenty-two years after the challenge of CMI, only one of the seven problems had been solved. Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman solved the Poincare Conjecture, but more interestingly, he refused to accept the one million dollar prize.
