‘Outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem

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‘Outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem

Tuesday, November 24, 2015
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YINS co-director Dan Spielman (along with his postdoc Adam Marcus, now at Princeton University, and his graduate student Nikhil Srivastava, now at the University of California, Berkeley) finally succeeded in solving the Kadison-Singer problem, a question about the foundations of quantum physics that had remained unsolved for almost 50 years.  And they did it despite knowing little of quantum mechanics or the Kadison-Singer problem’s allied mathematical field, called C*-algebras. Word spread quickly through the mathematics community that one of the paramount problems in C*-algebras and a host of other fields had been solved by three outsiders — computer scientists who had barely a nodding acquaintance with the disciplines at the heart of the problem. Mathematicians in these disciplines have greeted the news with a combination of delight and hand-wringing.

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