These notoriously hard “NP-complete” problems promise a million-dollar prize, awarded by the nonprofit Clay Mathematics Institute, for either finding their fast solution or proving that none exists. An amazing insight from the 1970s makes this challenge even more tantalizing: those thousand-plus problems are, in a deep sense, one and the same. If you solve one, you solve them all. This concept, now fundamental in the field of theoretical computer science, shows that certain groups of computational problems form a unified web. Discover a fast algorithm that solves Sudoku puzzles of any size, and you can now break the encryption schemes that protect our digital economy. Reveal a shortcut for scheduling a flight tour within a budget, and you can use it to solve nearly any famous open math problem.
The catastrophic decline in oyster landings has been well reported. For example, around the east coast of Scotland near Edinburgh, over 30 million oysters a year were landed in the 1830s. Just half a century later, landings had declined to less than 300,000 a year, and by the 1950s, oysters were declared locally extinct. This trend was repeated in coastal locations around Europe and today, only a handful of wild fisheries remain.
Less widely recognized is the massive loss of oyster habitat that accompanied these declines. Europe's seafloor is now largely dominated by shifting sand and mud, interspersed with rocky boulders covered in kelp, and occasional seagrass patches.
The future, in itself, exerts an attractive force—not just the general future, with its bland procession of potential events, but the futuristic future, with its alluring, fascinating, and forbidding narrative turns.
Eddie Winston is 90, but for all practical purposes he is more like 17. Like a teenager, he’s gregarious, gangly but strong (few 90-year-olds can sit in the grass for a picnic lunch and then hop up again, no problem) and — most important — he has yet to enjoy his first kiss.
This unlikely but delightful character is at the heart of Marianne Cronin’s novel, “Eddie Winston is Looking for Love,” an entertaining story filled with all good things — friendship, honor, generosity, humor and, yes, love.