FOM: Re: Hilbert's 24th problem

teun@cs.vu.nl teun at cs.vu.nl
Tue Apr 10 02:59:49 EDT 2001


I would not dare to make such a joke. For some reason the discovery is not getting the attention that it deserves, at least from my point of view.
Thiele noticed something in Hilbert's notes that apparently nobody before him noticed, because he certainly was not the first to study them.
After Ruediger Thiele lectured about his discovery in Amsterdam last year I wrote a short paper (in Dutch) on it for the Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde:
T. Koetsier, Hilberts 24ste Probleem, Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde 5th series, part 2, nr. 1, March 2001, pp. 65-67.
There is a photo of the page from Hilbert's notes that contains most of the text. 
I don't know how difficult it is to get hold of the Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde (the journal of the Wiskundig Genootschap = the Dutch Mathematical Society)outside of the Netherlands.
Teun Koetsier



Stephen G Simpson wrote:
> 
> Charles Silver Fri, 6 Apr 2001 writes:
>  >     Was that business about Hilbert's 24th simply an April Fool's
>  > joke?
> 
> I am trying to track it down.  Ruediger Thiele is a real person, a
> historian of mathematics, see
> 
>    http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~ksi/Thielepub.html
> 
> However, I haven't found any web reference to his lecture on this,
> except the FOM message from Teun Koetsier.  The Koetsier message was
> dated April 4, not April 1.
> 
> -- Steve




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