MetaFilter posts tagged with problems

Stop me if you've heard this joke: DIEBOLD VOTING MACHINES

spock — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:40:46 -0800

Once again, The Onion comes a little too close to the truth for comfort. Or in reality, are things working just fine? Security at Diebold is as tight as ever. Concerns (again) in Ohio. Also: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." (Bill Shakespeare)

"Filmmakers like Gilliam keep coming to the Canadian talent trough for child actors because our kids, by all accounts, tend to be easy to direct, manage, and mould.

amberglow — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 20:42:56 -0800

Sarah Polley, the little girl in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, finds out that another little Canadian girl is about to star in another Terry Gilliam film, and writes--and warns--about her experiences. Gilliam responds.

A Tangled Tale

plep — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 11:27:04 -0800

Maths puzzles and more problems. Found whilst searching for the fiendish the Monty Hall Problem. A Tangled Tale, indeed.

Psychology has failed?

grahamwell — Mon, 19 May 2003 08:56:02 -0800

Psychology has failed. It's not often that an entire academic discipline collapses, but according to Peter Watson, author of A Terrible Beauty, that's what is happening to Psychology. "....it has failed technologically, philosophically and is already in an advanced stage of decomposition." [more inside]

'The Poincare Conjecture' Solved?

eyebeam — Thu, 08 May 2003 14:31:49 -0800

'The Poincare Conjecture' Solved? "Dr Grigori Perelman, of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, claims to have proved the Poincare Conjecture, one of the most famous problems in mathematics. The Poincare Conjecture, an idea about three-dimensional objects, has haunted mathematicians for nearly a century. If it has been solved, the consequences will reverberate throughout geometry and physics."

Also of note is that Perelman's solution is only a benign side effect of his efforts toward defining all three-dimensional surfaces mathematically, which if successful would allow humanity to "produce a catalogue of all possible three-dimensional shapes in the Universe, meaning that [mankind] could ultimately describe the actual shape of the cosmos itself."

palegirl — Wed, 24 May 2000 20:11:26 -0800

The Poincaré Conjecture: If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the the surface of the apple is ‘simply connected,’ but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out be be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since.

...but if you can prove it, [or any of six other 'millenium prize problems'] the clay mathematics institute wants to line your pockets with $1M