Step 1: Post Elusive Proof. Step 2: Watch Fireworks.

[groovedaddy]

The potential of Internet-based collaboration was vividly demonstrated this month when complexity theorists used blogs and wikis to pounce on a claimed proof for one of the most profound and difficult problems facing mathematicians and computer scientists.

Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician and electrical engineer at Hewlett-Packard, posted a proposed proof of what is known as the “P versus NP” problem on a Web site, and quietly notified a number of the key researchers in a field of study that focuses on problems that are solvable only with the application of immense amounts of computing power.

The researcher asserted that he had demonstrated that P (the set of problems that can be easily solved) does not equal NP (those problems that are difficult to solve, but easy to verify once a solution is found). As with earlier grand math challenges — for example, Fermat’s last theorem — there is a lot at stake, not the least of which is a $1 million prize.

In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute picked seven of the greatest unsolved problems in the field, named them “Millennium Problems” and offered $1 million for the solution of each of them. P versus NP is one of those problems. (In March, the first prize was awarded to a reclusive Russian mathematician, Grigory Perelman, for the solution to the century-old Poincaré conjecture. A few months later he refused the prize.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/science/17proof.html?th&emc=th

[phantom power]

1. “It’s not just, ‘Hey, everybody, look at this,’ ” he said, “but rather ...

“It’s not just, ‘Hey, everybody, look at this,’ ” he said, “but rather a new set of norms is emerging about what it means to do mathematics, assuming coordinated participation.”

That is an interesting statement.