Mathematicians Begin to Tame Wild Sunflower Problem | Quanta Magazine
Posed by the mathematicians Paul ErdQs and Richard Rado in 1960, the problem concerns how often you would expect to find patterns resembling sunflowers in large collections of objects, such as a large scattering of points in the plane. While the new result doesn t fully solve ErdQs and Rado s sunflower conjecture, it advances the mathematical understanding of how surprisingly intricate structures emerge out of randomness. To do so, it reimagined the problem in terms of a computer function taking advantage of the increasingly rich interplay between theoretical computer science and pure mathematics.