Abstract
I recently completed a general audience book on the P versus NP problem [1]. Writing the book has forced me to step back and take a fresh look at the question from a non-technical point of view. There are really two different P versus NP problems. One is the formal mathematical question, first formulated by Steve Cook in 1971 [2] and listed as one of the six unresolved millennium problems by the Clay Mathematics Institute. The other P versus NP problem is the one that interests physicists, biologists, economists and the mathematically-curious general public. This talk will explore both faces of the P versus NP problem and what it means for mathematics and computer science moving forward.
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References
Fortnow, L.: The Golden Ticket: P, NP and the search for the impossible. Princeton University Press, Princeton (2013)
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Fortnow, L. (2013). A Personal View of the P versus NP Problem. In: Bonizzoni, P., Brattka, V., Löwe, B. (eds) The Nature of Computation. Logic, Algorithms, Applications. CiE 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7921. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39053-1_17
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