Brian Wecht
speaker
852 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 5 Sep
Brian Wecht’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But it turns out that this was uh it guided much of twentieth century mathematics and some of these problems were resolved uh in the positive, some of them were proved, sometimes counterexamples were were shown.
And uh many of these problems still remain outstanding today that people people don't know.
But Brian, yes, why should we solve these problems?
Well, Steve, uh there are various answers to that, right?
Sometimes they're uh they get at deep truths about the structure of things like numbers or primes or whatever like or something like that.
Sometimes they're just technical, interesting problems.
There's a variety of things.
Sometimes they have applications to other you know, to the real world.
There's no general why except it's interesting math and maybe we'll learn something by by solving them.
So anyway.
Cut to the end of the 20th century, people want these Hilbert problems were so successful that people wanted to do something similar moving into the 21st century.
So they asked this guy, Steve Smell, to come up with a list of problems.
And he came up with a list of problems for the 21st century.
And it's one of these specific smell problems I want to talk about today.
It's called the Jacobian conjecture.
Okay.
Now it's a bit technical, but what the Jacobian
Conjecture has to do with is maps, that is to say, functions between some number of variables and the same number of variables.
So for example, if I take uh these are all polynomial functions.
So to review, a polynomial is basically the simplest kind of function.
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