Open problems, open mathematics

[This is a guest post by Antonio Auffinger. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Despite writing papers in pure mathematics, much of my time in the past decade was spent talking (mostly listening, to be accurate) to biologists, computer scientists, and physicists. Theoretical physics and computer science are grounded in mathematics and thus share much of our language and, to some extent, our culture. The barriers between biology and mathematics are an order of magnitude higher. I am convinced that biologists are part of a different species. The language, incentives, culture, training, and everything else you might think of appear to be completely disconnected from the way we do mathematics. Yet, the similarities are abundant: the pursuit of understanding, the excitement of discovery when new patterns or phenomena emerge, and the hours needed to make minor advances, sometimes leaving us with just frustration. The intuition of…