Yesterday morning on my way to school I had a nice surprise and heard Ivan Fesenko on BBC Radio 4 today talking about a new £2.3 million grant that academics at Oxford University and The University of Nottingham have won to tackle some of the greatest unsolved pure mathematics problems.
The short interview is well worth a listen here (start 1 hour 222 minutes in). The team lead by Professor Ivan Fesenko at Nottingham will look at ways of tackling the generalized Riemann Hypothesis and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Both of these are Clay Millenium problems, and more information is available on the Clay Mathematics Institute website. They are obviously incredibly hard…..
I really liked Ivan’s description of mathematics as a “very large old oak tree, with many, many branches still developing. Most mathematicians are working and sitting on one of those new branches.”