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| Discover Magazine |
1 The median score for college-bound seniors on the math section of the SAT in 2011 is about 510 out of 800. So right there is proof that there are lots of unsolved math problems.
2 The great 19th-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss called his field “the queen of sciences.”
3 If math is a queen, she’s the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland, who bragged that she believed “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” (No surprise that Lewis Carroll also wrote about plane algebraic geometry.)
4 For example, the Navier-Stokes equations are used all the time to approximate turbulent fluid flows around aircraft and in the bloodstream, but the math behind them still isn’t understood.
5 And the oddest bits of math often turn out to be useful. Quaternions, which can describe the rotation of 3-D objects, were discovered in 1843. They were considered beautiful but useless until 1985, when computer scientists applied them to rendering digital animation.
My favorite Calculus problem:
More at the link below:
Discover Magazine: 20 Things You Didn't Know About...Math
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