Sam Wikeley
speaker
111 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 6d ago
Sam Wikeley’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
One thing we can say for sure is that something significant has happened.
But the way in which this becomes significant, I think, is very much dependent on who you ask.
This really should be an amazing moment for mathematics.
This is a major, major problem that they have been trying to work out for a long time.
But the way in which it has happened has meant that there are a lot of complex feelings at play here within the mathematics community.
And there are some serious questions that these mathematicians will be asking and answering over the years to come.
Right.
So it has this somewhat complex name.
It's called the Navier-Stokes smoothness and existence problem.
And it relates to this set of equations called the Navier-Stokes equation.
So what these are, are a set of equations that describe the motions of fluids.
So here we're talking liquids and gases.
So that means they're very useful in a broad variety of practical cases, like modeling how air is going to flow over the wings of aircraft or over Formula One cars, for tracking how blood will circulate around the body, for modeling how oil will squeeze through pipes, and so on and so on.
And so that's all good and well.
You know, physicists, engineers, they have a great grasp of how to use these equations in these practical scenarios.
But what mathematicians are interested in is understanding the structure of the equations themselves.
So they would like to understand these general properties of what is and isn't allowed within these equations.
And this is where this problem that OpenAI say they have solved comes in, this existence and smoothness problem.
It asks, in a broad sense, whether there are situations where these Navier-Stokes equations break down when describing seemingly well-behaved fluids.
Is there a point at which they diverge from reality?
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