After decades of stalemate , someone has made a breakthrough with the “ Hadwiger - Nelson job ” , a devilishly unmanageable mathematical problem that has remained unanswered since 1950 . Most incredibly of all , the soul who figured it out is n’t rigorously even a mathematician , he ’s a British computer scientist - turn - biologist who spends most of his energy endeavor to engineer a " cure " for ripening .
Aubrey de Grey has recently helped to solve this decade - old quandary in a paper call “ The Chromatic Number of the Plane is at least 5 ” . The discipline has not yet been independently peer - look back , but you’re able to find a preprint of the paper onarXiv .
The mathematical riddle sounds comparatively square to the uninitiated but make no mistake , professional mathematicians have been unable to break up it for almost 70 year . Here ’s how it goes : think a collecting of points link up by lines of exactly the same duration . If you were to colour all the points , with no two connecting back breaker being the same color , how many dissimilar color are required to color in an infinite plane ?
Over the age , scientists have whittle down the estimate for the number of colors to somewhere between four and seven . Now , de Grey has shown that it is not potential to colourize all the points with just four dissimilar colors . Therefore , the minimal number of colors needed is at least five . Considering that researchers have been at a total deadlock with this problem for 10 , this is a moderately big breakthrough .
The discovery was made by playing around with a Moser spindle , a pattern that ’s composed of seven pane and 11 edge . Using data processor software program , de Grey coalesce copies of the Moser spindle into a Brobdingnagian WWW of 20,425 connected points . He was then able to use this to show that at least five colouration were postulate to color in the dots using the “ rules of the biz ” .
“ I got extraordinarily prosperous , ” de Grey toldQuanta Magazine . “ It ’s not every 24-hour interval that somebody do up with the solution to a 60 - twelvemonth - honest-to-goodness problem . ”
When he is n’t meddlesome crack intellect - melting math problems in his supererogatory time , de Grey works on pioneering research geared towards extending the human lifetime . One of the 55 - year - old scientist’sbiggest claimsis that humans have the potential to live to the ripe old eld of 1,000 year . It ’s a bold title , and his workisn’t without its critic , but de Grey continues to write and upgrade some of the most pioneering regenerative medication in the world .
[ H / T : Quanta Magazine ]
