Carl Feynman explains why Navier-Stokes became a Millennium Prize problem
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-14
Carl Feynman responds to Yoav Goldberg's question about why the 'mathy-and-useless' version of Navier-Stokes earned Millennium Prize status:
- Blowup is the crux: a key goal in PDE theory is proving whether solutions can go to infinity in finite time. Proving blowup for a chosen initial condition is one direction; proving no-blowup for all possible starting conditions often requires considerable creativity.
- When the Millennium problems were picked around 2000, Navier-Stokes was the most important PDE whose blowup behavior remained undecided — plenty of more obscure PDEs had already been settled one way or the other.
- The thread also distinguishes physicists' use of PDEs to model real problems from mathematicians' work proving properties about them.
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