The BBC’s general-discussion podcast In Our Time repeated another mathematics-themed session this week. The topic is P versus NP, a matter of computational complexity. P and NP here are shorthands to describe the amount of work needed to follow a procedure. And, particularly, how the amount of work changes as the size of the problem being worked on changes. We know there are problems of a complexity type P, and problems of a complexity type NP. What’s not known is whether those are, actually, the same, whether there’s a clever way of describing an NP problem so we can solve it with a P approach.
I do not remember whether I heard this program when it originally broadcast in 2015. And I haven’t had time to listen to this one yet. But these discussions are usually prett solid, and will get to discussing the ambiguities and limitations and qualifications of the field. So I feel comfortable recommending it even without a recent listen, which I will likely get to sometime during this week’s walks.
