Karl Popper's word

Corroboration

You cannot make a hard conjecture true by wanting it. You can only test a claim and watch whether it survives. This programme keeps honest score of the claims made against mathematics' most famous open problems, and of how each one has fared under test.

Why it exists

Every famous open problem attracts claimed solutions, a steady stream of them, serious and amateur alike. Almost none are ever formally examined. And the few lists that tracked them died with their keepers.

Gerhard Woeginger kept the record of claimed P-versus-NP proofs for twenty years. When he died, it froze. The RSA Factoring Challenge kept the record of broken keys until a company switched it off. The scarce thing was never the mathematics. It was someone to keep honest score, and to keep keeping it.

The discipline

Claims, never people

An entry records an event in the literature, not a judgment of its author. No leaderboards, no mockery.

Every receipt shown

Each number carries its source and its date. Nothing floats free of the evidence behind it.

Self-adjudicating where the maths allows

A claimed factorisation settles on one multiplication. Where a claim checks itself, the register does the arithmetic and shows its working.

It breathes

A public pulse, not a snapshot that rots. You can tell quiet-because-nothing-happened from quiet-because-broken.

It does not die with a keeper

A machine keeps the record and people stand on the gate. When one keeper stops, the record does not.

Open, and unwatched

The data is public and the pages carry no trackers. This site watches mathematics, not its readers.

The registers

The P versus NP Register

Continuing the page kept by Gerhard Woeginger, 1996–2016. The 116 historical dossiers preserved, the decade since his final entry censused, every statistic with its receipt.

First register

The Factoring Claims Register

Continuing the withdrawn RSA Factoring Challenge, 1991–2007. The 54-number RSA catalogue beside today's "RSA is broken" claims, each graded by its class.

Second register

The Classification Record

Not claims, but a record. An audit of the paper trail behind the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, an accepted proof: 507 references censused across two bibliographies, and how the record of one of the largest proofs ever assembled has aged. It audits the record, never the mathematics.

Third register

What follows

Further registers follow only when they are earned: a corpus captured, its sources watched, its record proven against the same discipline. A register that cannot show its receipts does not ship.

Correspondence, corrections, and claims: mark@pensionable.ai. A correction to any entry, sent with a source, is the most welcome message this programme receives.