How are there unsolved math problems?
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They’re not “math problems” in the school sense…it’s not like there’s an equation that we just can’t solve, although there are some equations so complicated that we can only solve them numerically on a computer, not with regular algebra.
“Unsolved math problems” are statements about mathematics that we (so far) can’t prove are true or false. For example, until pretty recently, we didn’t know if there were any integer solutions to the equation “x^n + y^n = z^n” for any n bigger than 2. It sure looked like there weren’t, we couldn’t find any, but just because we can’t find it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Infinitiy is annoying that way. And mathmaticians *hate* ambiguity…they want to prove that something either is definitely true or definitely isn’t. This particular problem was called “Fermat’s Last Theorem”. Fermat was a mathmatician who wrote it down (the problem) in 1637 but we didn’t figure out how to prove it until 1993/1994. It was unsolved for over 300 years.
Other unsolved math problems are like that…things we’re not sure are true or not…they look true but we can’t prove it and, until we prove it (or not) it will remain “unsolved”.
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