Psychologist wants to do the Hilbert thing

(PhysOrg.com) -- Just over a century ago, one of the world’s leading mathematicians posed this question to a number of his colleagues: What are the most important unsolved questions in mathematics?

The answers - which David Hilbert then ranked in what he believed to be their order of importance - produced a list of 23 mathematical problems that shaped mathematics for 100 years.

This past Saturday, Stephen Kosslyn, dean of Harvard’s Division of Social Science, posed a Hilbert-like challenge to a diverse group of social scientists he had spent two years gathering:

What, he asked, are the great unanswered questions in the social sciences?

Hilbert selected and ranked the final problems himself, but Kosslyn, the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James, is using technology to revolutionize, and democratize, the process. Selecting the important issues in the field isn’t just his job - it’s everyone’s.

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Over the next two months, the University’s Division of Social Science will collect online submissions at Hard Problems web site and at a Hard Problems Facebook page. Anyone, anywhere, regardless of their field of expertise, is encouraged to submit questions for consideration until May 31.

The conference and list were the brainchild of Harvard College graduate Nick Nash ’00, a joint chemistry and physics concentrator who has been thinking for some time about what he perceives as the need to improve awareness and understanding of the social sciences. “These are the sciences of our shared humanity,” he told a reporter. “But these sciences are much more in their infancy relative to physics or chemistry.”