Chinese mathematicians in US say they have cracked century-old fluid mechanics puzzle

Two young Chinese mathematicians working in the United States, along with an international collaborator, may have solved a century-old problem in fluid mechanics – an area of study that is critical to many engineering fields including hydraulic systems, the design of dams and bridges, and aerodynamics.

In a paper published on March 3 on arXiv, an open-access platform for preprint papers that are yet to be peer reviewed, the trio said they had resolved “Hilbert’s sixth problem” by proving the mathematics of fluid mechanics.

The study was co-authored by Deng Yu, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, along with Ma Xiao and Zaher Hani, both from the University of Michigan’s Department of Mathematics.

The breakthrough has triggered discussion on social media, especially in China.

“They solved the century-long problem and brought Hilbert’s sixth problem in the narrow sense to a successful conclusion,” Maths Five Group, an account run by five Chinese PhD students of pure maths in Germany and France, commented on Chinese social media on March 5.

At the intersection of physics and mathematics, researchers ask whether it is possible to establish physics as a rigorous branch of mathematics by taking microscopic laws as axioms and proving macroscopic laws as theorems. Axioms are mathematical statements that are assumed to be true, while a theorem is a logical consequence of axioms.

Hilbert’s sixth problem addresses that challenge, according to a post by Ma on Wednesday on Zhihu, a Quora-like Chinese online content platform.

In 1900, David Hilbert, a German mathematician and one of the most influential of his time, famously presented 23 problems at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The sixth one was intended to reduce to a system of basic axioms, or truths, those branches of physics in which mathematics was prevalent.

  

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