Problem 13 of Hilbert's famous twenty-three is the most easily understood of the collection. The truth of Hilbert's conjecture concerning the resolution of his problem was intuitively pleasing and widely-held: roughly stated, the number of variables in an equation is a measure of the complexity of the equation. In 1957 a nineteen year old student of Andrey Kolmogorov, Vladimir Arnold, proved that two variables suffice. That is, any function of more than two variables can be recast as a function of only two variables. From Algebra to Computational Algorithms recounts the history of Problem 13,...
Problem 13 of Hilbert's famous twenty-three is the most easily understood of the collection. The truth of Hilbert's conjecture concerning the resoluti...
