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Comment by onos | Hacker News Reader

I see thanks. I guess, hearing about other famous hard problems, I am used to seeing comments like: “if problem X could be solved it would unlock lots of other important areas of math.” Wondering if this tiling area draws attention for its own sake alone or if the problems here are similarly vectors to attack larger issues.

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Math has problems where everyone suspects the proof will open doors and give valuable insight- I'm mostly plugged into topology where there are a lot of those. There are also problems that aren't interesting except in their difficulty, which drives the creation of new techniques and tools- Fermat's Last Theorem isn't particularly useful, but the effort to prove it created a vast body of spinoff work. But you also see problems that are more passive, waiting for someone to approach them with new firepower. Tilings are more like that- a testing ground for new techniques, and a way for mathematicians to keep their wits sharp.

Also, they do have some inherent beauty. I mean an aperiodic tiling is crazy right? And with one tile?

Out of curiosity, could you share the exciting unproven theorems in topology you referred to?

One big name is the Borel Conjecture- a very productive aspect of topology is developing finer and finer tools to detect differences between spaces. The Borel Conjecture essentially states that for a certain class of spaces, a well used and loved tool is equivalent to an extremely strong tool.

I was thinking more historically though. The development of those tools was driven by specific problems- classifying the behavior of higher dimensional spheres, determining if genus uniquely classifies spaces (not at all, but I believe people were once hopeful), even knot theory is an outgrowth of this kind of research.

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