Abstract
The invitation of the Organizing Committee for me to speak about “Unsolved problems in mathematics” fills me as it should with considerable trepidation and a prevailing feeling of personal inadequacy. Hilbert gave a talk on this subject at the similar congress about 50 years ago and this is a very formidable precedent. He stated about a dozen unsolved problems in another widely separated areas of mathematics, and they proved to be prototypical for much of the development that followed in the next decades. It would be absolutely foolish, if I tried to emulate this quite singular feat. In addition I do not know the future and the future at any rate can only be predicted ex post with any degree of reliability. I will, therefore, define what I am trying to do in a much more narrow way, hoping that in this manner I have a better chance of not failing. I will limit myself to a particular area of mathematics which I think I know and I will talk about it and about what its open ends appear to be, particularly in some directions which are not the ones that the evolution so far has mainly emphasized and which are, I think, quite important.
Typescript of von Neumann’s address to the International Congress of Mathematicians, Amsterdam, September 2–9, 1954
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Editors’ Notes
On the margin of the original copy there is a word — unfortunately undecipherable to the editors — followed by a “?”.
On the original copy, there is a huge question mark on the margin of the present paragraph. It is unclear who put the question mark there. It indicates that this paragraph appeared incomprehensible for some reader, and indeed the paragraph is very confused.
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© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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von Neumann, J. (2001). Unsolved Problems in Mathematics. In: Rédei, M., Stöltzner, M. (eds) John von Neumann and the Foundations of Quantum Physics. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook [2000], vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2012-0_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2012-0_16
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