A Community-Driven Map for Open Math Problems
If you've ever fallen down a rabbit hole of unsolved math conjectures, you know the feeling. You find a fascinating problem, but then you're left wondering: Has anyone made progress? Is there a known approach? Who's even working on this? The landscape of open problems can feel vast and disconnected.
That's exactly what the Erdos Problems project tackles. It's a living, collaborative GitHub repository that acts as a community wiki and progress tracker for a specific set of mathematical problems. It turns a static list of questions into a dynamic map of collective effort.
What It Does
In essence, this repository is a curated, version-controlled knowledge base for the "Erdos problems"—a list of open questions originally penned by the legendary mathematician Paul Erdos. The project uses GitHub's core features (issues, pull requests, markdown files) to document each problem, track partial results, note connections to other problems, and log when a problem is finally solved.
It's not just a list. Each problem has its own dedicated markdown file, serving as a central hub for all known information, updates, and discussions related to that specific challenge.
Why It's Cool
The clever part is in the implementation. The maintainers have turned GitHub, a tool built for code collaboration, into a powerful framework for mathematical research tracking. Here’s how:
- Leverages Existing Tools: It uses GitHub Issues for discussion and PRs for submitting updates, so there's no new platform to learn. The entire workflow is familiar to developers.
- Transparent History: Every update, comment, and correction is tracked via git history. You can see the exact evolution of thought on a problem.
- Community-Driven Verification: Proposed solutions or progress updates are reviewed via pull requests, allowing experts in the community to vet contributions before they're merged into the main "knowledge base."
- Interlinked Knowledge: Problems are cross-referenced, creating a graph of mathematical ideas. Solving or making progress on one problem can automatically update the status of related problems.
It’s a fantastic example of using a developer-centric platform to solve a knowledge-management problem in an academic field. The model could be applied to track progress in other research areas or even large-scale software RFCs.
How to Try It
You don't need to install anything. The entire project is browsable on GitHub.
- Head over to the repository: github.com/teorth/erdosproblems.
- Start by reading the