the.com/conjecture
A guess wearing a tuxedo, daring mathematicians to spend their lives proving it right.
means A conclusion formed on incomplete evidence — an educated guess offered without proof.
from From Latin conicere, "to throw together" (com-, "together," plus iacere, "to throw") — the same iacere that hurls a projectile and ejects a tenant. A conjecture is literally what you get when you toss the available scraps of evidence into a heap and see what shape they seem to form. The mental sense — casting facts together to reach a verdict — arrived in English by way of Old French in the late Middle Ages, and once carried a whiff of divination, the soothsayer flinging bones to read the future.
- Fermat's tease
- His last conjecture stayed unproven for 358 years
- Pay to play
- Some carry million-dollar bounties for a proof
- Goldbach's ghost
- Every even number, allegedly two primes, still unproven
- Collatz curse
- A children's puzzle no genius has cracked
- Promotion path
- Survives long enough, becomes a theorem
goldbach's conjecture — unproven since 1742: every even integer > 2 is sum of two primes
riemann hypothesis — unproven since 1859: distribution of prime numbers follows specific pattern
collatz conjecture — unproven since 1937: any positive integer eventually reaches 1 via simple rules