Tuesday, August 17, 2010

MIT Math Courses (Free!) & Still MORE P vs. NP

Interested in a math course? Why not go with one of the best!... Massachusetts Institute of Technology shares many mathematics courses in some form online for free (...one of my favorite words!) under their "open courseware" program:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/

And hope readers don't find these links I keep providing too redundant, but RJ Lipton has a new post nicely recapitulating the interesting events of the first week of the P ≠ NP proof announcement:

http://tinyurl.com/25rbpmu


Meanwhile, the NY Times covers the story HERE.

For any who still don't 'get' why so much attention is being lavished on this abstruse problem, I'll just note that Scott Aaronson sums it up as the "the biggest unsolved problem of theoretical computer science, and one of the deepest questions ever asked by human beings!"

And for those who find audio-visual material easier to follow than written words, there are several P vs. NP video presentations on the Web. Of those I've briefly looked at so far, I think the one below is particularly good/helpful (hour-long talk by Michael Sipser at the Clay Institute For Mathematics). I recommend it to anyone interested in, but still having difficulty grasping, the essence of the discussion:

http://claymath.msri.org/sipser2006.mov

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