NOTICE: Change of policy for announcement of solved problems (August 4, 2002)

The policy ofh this Site has been to consider a problem settled if there is a paper accepted for publication in a refereed journal. Exceptions were made for preprints available on-line.

We have re-examined this policy and are no longer permitting such exceptions. As always, people are free to make preliminary versions of results available, but we will be guided by acceptances in refereed journals only.

We have made changes in our Hall of Fame to be consistent with this new policy. We make no judgment regarding the validity of any such claims.

Our Policy

In selecting the problems, our choices have been, in part, determined by our own tastes. In view of this, we particularly welcome suggestions from other members of the community. We note however that every submitted problem will undergo a selection process by the members of our editorial board (yet to be elected), and the standards to be used in this process will probably be rather high. In particular, one of the requirements will be that more than one person has thought about a proposed problem. If you just have run into some problem in the course of your research and you are not sure how hard or how new or how interesting this problem is, we suggest that you send it to the "Group Pub Forum" for discussion.

We know that sometimes, there is controversy about as to whether a problem is settled or not. In particular, many announcements of solutions are not supported by subsequent publications. Therefore, our policy is to consider a problem settled only if there is a paper accepted for publication in a refereed journal.

Problems that have been or are solved after the first draft of this list was put on-line in June 1997, will not be removed from the list; instead, they will be marked by a * and a reference to the solution will be provided in the Background section. The names of solvers can be found in our Hall of Fame

Other sources of controversy might be questions of priority (in solving one problem or another) and attribution (of a problem to a particular person). We want to emphasize that all references we give and attributions we make reflect our personal opinion based on the information we have. We welcome any additional information and/or corrections on these issues.


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