What's the longest time you've spent on one single math, physics, or chemistry problem?

[Random Variable]

I've been working since this early morning on expressing the entropy of a two-state paramagnet as a function of its temperature. 😱

 

[FFactory0x]

I know some of the people studying materials i think its called sometimes spent a day or two on one problem

 

[Heisenberg]

About 9 months if you count my research project.

 

[EngenZerO]

i spent 4 hours on this one EE problem once... thing was fricking impossible.

 

[chowmein]

i've spent the good part of the last 20 years trying to figure out time travel

 

[eLiu]

A real analysis problem (that I'm not typing up). It went along the lines of proving some stuff with improper integration on sequences of functions. It was essentially a weak form of Lesbegue's dominated convergence theorem...but without the benefit of the theory of measurability.

I never solved it...the IMO kid in our class didn't solve it either. The teacher gave everyone credit for it...b/c no one solved it.

The hardest problem that I did solve was proving that if E is compact, then every infinite subset of E has a limit point in E...and vice versa.

Edit: I worked on the first one w/some friends for something like 7 or 8 hours. (counting food breaks & doing other random sh!t breaks).

The second one took me about 5 hours.

 

[eigen]

7 MONTHS and Counting.

 

[Random Variable]

The answer to the problem is Nk[ln(2cosh(µB/kT) - (µB/kT)tanh(µB/kT)]

I'm the smartest man alive!!! Ok, not really. 😱

 

[desteffy]

3-6 months