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Jewish prof. solves 'hopeless' riddle
Computer helps N.J. professor Vladislav Goldberg, two others figure out 51-year-old problem raised by Nazi mathematician
German mathematician Wilhelm Blaschke once called it a "hopeless" problem. Yet, nothing is hopeless when you are a brilliant Jewish mathematician.
Decades later, a 70-year-old professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Vladislav Goldberg, shares the credit for solving it.
Blaschke, a pioneer in the branch of mathematics known as web geometry, wrote in 1955 that it was nearly impossible to find the conditions under which a web might be transformed into a different kind of web with different numbers of nonintersecting, straight lines.
To describe such a transition mathematically would require leaps of logic and multitudes of calculations that were too great, Blaschke said.
Even as economic forecasters and theoretical physicists found uses for web geometry in subsequent decades, Blaschke's riddle remained.
Computer solved the web
There was, of course, one thing that wasn't available to Blaschke in the 1950s: a powerful computer.
Using advanced computer software, Goldberg solved the problem with Maks Akivis of Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Valentin Lychagin of Norway.
The Journal of Geometric Analysis in March published Goldberg and Lychagin's paper, "On the Blaschke conjecture for 3-webs."
There is a particular irony in Goldberg's solving Blaschke's problem.
The irony
During the 1930s and '40s, Blaschke was a Nazi Party member; Goldberg is a Moscow-born Jew who had to struggle against anti-Semitism for decades during his career as a Soviet academic.
Goldberg, however, isn't smug over the accomplishment.
"I could never feel that way. Blaschke was a great mathematician," said Goldberg, who will retire next month.
