Effort to Model Facebook Yields Key to Famous Math Problem (and a Prize)
Effort to Model Facebook Yields Key to Famous Math Problem (and a Prize)
Monday, July 7, 2014
Dan Spielman, a Yale computer scientist, wasn’t looking for a new problem. He was already deeply immersed in a tricky effort to model complex online communities like Facebook, hoping to gain insight into how they form and interact.
But when a colleague in Jerusalem observed that aspects of Spielman’s research brought to mind the famous — and unsolved — Kadison-Singer math problem, Spielman saw irresistibly low-hanging fruit — or so it seemed.