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Rudybega • yesterday at 10:28 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

To give some context:

Kakeya / local smoothing (math): The result would resolve the Kakeya conjecture and Stein’s restriction conjecture across all dimensions together. Mathematicians had been making progress one dimension at a time, so this would settle a whole family of central harmonic analysis problems at once.

ETH is false (computer science): ETH has been used as a computational hardness premise in hundreds of papers, so a disproof would undercut a large body of existing complexity results. It would also change what researchers think is achievable for efficient computation.

QCD existence (physics): It would give a rigorous mathematical foundation to the theory of the strong force, which physicists have used for decades without proving it’s well-defined. It also bears on a Millennium Prize Problem.


Replies

emil-lp • yesterday at 11:09 PM

I would guess ETH has been assumed in thousands of papers. I have several myself.

On the positive side, suddenly there's a whole bunch of open problems!

dekhn • yesterday at 11:09 PM

Is there any obvious path from these results to any sort of physics, chemistry, or biology breakthrough? From what I can tell: no (but I lack the physics and chemistry expertise to say anything about the QCD finding).

Turning the question arouhnd: what would be the most impactful thing for OpenAI or Anthropic to do to show large breakthroughs?

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jlev1 • yesterday at 10:56 PM

Thanks Claude!

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