Why is there still a lot of unsolved math problems, despite having really advanced computers?
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The meaning of “solving a math problem” is different when you’re learning math in school vs. professional mathematicians advancing the field of math.
For example, let’s consider the technique of long division. This is solving a mathematical problem of “How do you divide two numbers?” and long division is one solution to that problem. If you are asked in school to divide 2348 by 32 and you use long division to get an answer, you are not really solving a math problem. You are carrying out a known solution for a specific example of that problem.
So we don’t have unsolved math problems because they require too much computation for a human to do, and therefore computers could easily solve these problems. These are unsolved because we haven’t yet figured out what computation we need to do. That’s something that computers can’t do, only humans can do that. Once we figure out what to compute, computers are a big help in doing that, but that isn’t really the core of what solving a mathematical problem is.
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