A.W. Moore

From the London Review dated 22 July 2004

The Seven Million Dollar Question

“There are fundamental reasons of principle that, when it comes to settling unanswered mathematical questions, we shall never be able to dispense with divination and inspiration in favour of a mechanical application of rules. But even if the holy grail had existed, and even if we had found it, it might have been of purely theoretical interest. Of what practical significance would an algorithm have been if it had enabled us to determine whether or not the Reimann Hypothesis is true, but only if we had been able to spend a trillion times as long on the problem as it will take for the earth to be swallowed up by the sun?” [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography