A mathematical puzzle that baffled the top minds in the esoteric field of symbolic dynamics for nearly four decades has been cracked — by a 63-year-old immigrant who once had to work as a security guard.
Avraham Trahtman, a mathematician who also toiled as a laborer after moving to Israel from Russia, succeeded where dozens failed, solving the elusive "Road Coloring Problem."- Link to Associated Press.
Having spent an evening on yongfook.com's pretty-boy blog, I was feeling disheartened by academic work. (Research is hard, it takes hours and it involves very little pay.)
For some reason, knowing that a Russian immigrant with a math degree has solved a problem in just 8 pages in pencil on a problem with real-world application, pleases me tremendously.
"First posed in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss and Roy Adler, the problem posits that given a finite number of roads, one should be able to draw a map, coded in various colors, that leads to a certain destination regardless of the point of origin. The 63-year-old Trakhtman jotted downin pencil in 8 pages. The problem has real-world implementation in message and traffic routing."
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