Comment by dooglius
2 hours ago
> I think it is against the spirit of Erdős to regard any problem as 'closed' -- whenever one form of a question is answered, many others are created, and all problems deserve continued attention.
But I thought the whole idea of the list was that it catalogued precisely the problems Erdos posed that he did not solve. The broader set of "all problems Erdos found interesting, including those he resolved" would be both larger and I suspect qualitatively different.
Erdos never had a list of all the problems he posed, and the people who have compiled lists at times had to do guesswork for what were actually problems or not. So there is no precise list of Erdos problems, just to be clear.
What I think you might be missing, though, is that Erdos was inherently playful with these problems. He'd sometimes just drop in the middle of a paper "hey, this variant of this lemma is neat, I bet it's true, but I'll give cash to anyone who disproves it" and move on. Or challenge a colleague while visiting and collaborating with them, and the problem would get spread by word of mouth. The problems often weren't things he thought long and hard about individually, but they appealed to his sense of aesthetics and curiosity and play. I think that's maybe close to what Bloom is talking about there. It's handy to have a catalog, but fundamentally, creating a set of unsolved math problems was not what Erdos was doing.
The idea is that people liked recreational math and enjoyed practicing it. AI bros with little interest in math showed up for marketing reasons or to "show" the nerds. Some mathematicians joined them too. One of the nerds is now saying "I don't find it fun anymore". That's really it. I wouldn't look for hidden meaning when it's spelled out pretty clearly.
The same happened in FOSS. I have little interest to contribute nowadays, when GitHub is full of vibe coders naming themselves engineers.
> One of the nerds is now saying "I don't find it fun anymore".
To be fair, it isn't just "one of the nerds", it is the nerd that was hosting the party that all the AI bros were gatecrashing. He's not saying the competitive AI-powered and reputation-seeking performative math problem solving shouldn't happen, he's just saying you don't get to do it in the little corner of the internet that he runs any more, showing off to all his friends. Go find some other website where the owner enjoys that, or build your own and create your own community and friends.