Timeline for answer to What is the oldest open math problem outside of number theory? by Timothy Chow
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Jul 19, 2025 at 21:40 | history | edited | Timothy Chow | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Updated the answer in light of a better understanding of a reference
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| Sep 15, 2024 at 22:49 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @MarkLewko I don't think that tracking down the text of the people who offered the prize is going to lead anywhere. A more promising route may be to look at the collected works of Halphen, to see what problems he stated explicitly. | |
| Sep 15, 2024 at 22:44 | comment | added | Mark Lewko | @TimothyChow: do you have any information about the original source of this problem? As an aside, I had never heard of the Steiner Prize. Apparently for some of its existence (which came to an end with WWI) eminent mathematicians of the era (including Dirichlet and Weierstrass) would pose problems, with the idea the prize would go to the best work on the problem. Reportedly these problems frequently went unsolved and the prizes unclaimed. It would be interesting to know if the full statements of these problems survive. See: ams.org/bookstore/pspdf/mprize-prev.pdf | |
| Sep 15, 2024 at 13:13 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | Look at the reference I gave hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/14748/… for examples "outside physics" and older than those in this list. | |
| Sep 14, 2024 at 20:06 | history | answered | Timothy Chow | CC BY-SA 4.0 |