Andreas de Santis
A FEW corners of the internet still rock something of a 1998 vibe, and Princeton University’s server has one of them. The text is in Times New Roman and comes in clashing shades of red, blue, mauve and orange. Down the left side is a list of seemingly obscure phrases like “Impossibility theorems”, “Spin glass” and “Separatrix separation”.
This is the website for Open Problems in Mathematical Physics, which, as the name suggests, is a list of the most mind-bending unsolved maths conundrums in physics. Crack any one of these beasts and you would probably earn yourself a Fields medal, the maths equivalent of a Nobel prize. That, and the editor of the website will post a cartoon explosion next to the problem bearing the word SOLVED!
One of these problems has had mathematicians stumped for years, with legions of them having made only piecemeal progress. Few people outside physics have heard of the quantum Hall conductance problem, but it is intimately connected with experiments that get us closer than ever to harnessing the mysterious power of quantum technology. You can imagine the anticipation, then, when a newcomer named Spyridon Michalakis claimed he had the answer. Fittingly, however, his solution to this impossible problem was itself impossible to understand – or at least nearly impossible.
Michalakis grew up in Greece, spending his summers on the island of Lesbos, playing beach volleyball in the sun with his two brothers. In the evenings, his siblings were glued to screens playing video games while he tinkered with maths puzzles. In 1994, when one older brother returned dejected from a prestigious national maths competition, 14-year-old …
