<p>Just in case this might be of interest to anyone out there (especially all you engineers and mathematicians), there was a little piece about a Smith-connected math project in the Ideas section of the Boston Sunday Globe on July 31. Here is an excerpt: </p>
<p>"Joseph O'Rourke, who teaches at Smith College, and Joseph S.B. Mitchell, who teaches at Stonybrook University, had each been collecting unsolved problems for a decade when they decided to publish a list of their top 30 in 2001. Soon thereafter they joined with precocious MIT professor Erik D. Demaine (who in 2003 won a MacArthur "genius" grant at age 22) to publish this list online, complete with a concise statement of each problem, its history, citations to related results, and in some cases a cash reward. Today, the majority of the list's 59 problems -- including nos. 4 (Union of Fat Objects in 3D), 30 (Thrackles), and 35 (Freeze Tag: Optimal Strategies for Awakening a Swarm of Robots) -- are still up for grabs....Aspiring solvers can claim the glory at maven.smith.edu/~orourke/TOPP."</p>