ABSTRACTIONS BLOG

What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult?

The Navier-Stokes equations describe simple, everyday phenomena, like water flowing from a garden hose, yet they provide a million-dollar mathematical challenge.

Physics contains equations that describe everything from the stretching of space-time to the flitter of photons. Yet only one set of equations is considered so mathematically challenging that it’s been chosen as one of seven “Millennium Prize Problems” endowed by the Clay Mathematics Institute with a $1 million reward: the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe how fluids flow.

Last month I wrote a story about an important new result related to those equations. If anything, the new work suggests that progress on the Millennium Prize will be even harder than expected. Why are these equations, which describe familiar phenomena such as water flowing through a hose, so much harder to understand mathematically than, say, Einstein’s field equations, which involve stupefying objects like black holes?