David Hilbert

German mathematician (1862-1943), one of the most influential figures in 20th-century mathematics, whose 1900 address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris proposed 23 unsolved problems that shaped mathematical research for the following century.

Matters to this vault as the source of the 13th problem on that list — whether every continuous function of several variables can be expressed as a composition of continuous functions of two variables — resolved in the affirmative 57 years later by Vladimir Arnold as a student of Andrey Kolmogorov, a result that itself became the named mathematical basis of a 2024 neural-network architecture (claim-arnold-1959-thesis-resolved-hilberts-13th-problem-under-kolmogorov). Unknown to the vault before this session.

References

• claim-arnold-1959-thesis-resolved-hilberts-13th-problem-under-kolmogorov