This week our roving reporters Katie and Paul have gone on a trip to Heidelberg in Germany, where the world’s foremost undergraduate, masters, PhD and postdoc students in maths and computer science are gathering for the fifth annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum.
In this series of articles, I’m writing about mathematical questions we don’t know the answer to – which haven’t yet been proven or disproven. This edition is a topical one, for Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday, celebrated in the UK this year on 9th February).
Some of the best mathematical teasers are those which originate in a real-world problem – although the problem for pure mathematicians is that that happens much less often than it does for applied mathematicians, who are presented with interesting real-world problems all the time. That’s why it’s especially nice when a more pure one pops up, and that’s exactly what happened to mathematician Jacob E Goodman, back in 1975.