thumb|David Hilbert
Hilbert's problems are 23 problems in mathematics published by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. They were all unsolved at the time, and several proved to be very influential for 20th-century mathematics. Hilbert presented ten of the problems (1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16, 19, 21, and 22) at the Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians, speaking on August 8 at the Sorbonne. The complete list of 23 problems was published later, and translated into English in 1902 by Mary Frances Winston Newson in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. Earlier publications (in the original German) appeared in Archiv der Mathematik und Physik.
Of the cleanly formulated Hilbert problems: 3, 6a, 7, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, and 21 have resolutions that are accepted by consensus of the mathematical community. The status of problems 1, 2, 5, 6b, 8c, 13, and 15 is controversial: there are some results, but there exists some controversy as to whether they resolve the problems. Problems 8a, 8b, 9, 12, 16, 20 and 22 are unresolved or widely agreed as unresolved despite some partial results. Problems 4 and 23 are considered as too vague to ever be described as solved; the withdrawn 24 would also be in this class.
List of Hilbert's problems
The following are the headers for Hilbert's 23 problems as they appeared in the 1902 translation of Hilbert's presentation, published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.
Nature and influence of the problems
Hilbert's problems ranged greatly in topic and precision. Some of them, like the 3rd problem, which was the first to be solved, or the 8th problem (the Riemann hypothesis), which still remains unresolved, were presented precisely enough to enable a clear affirmative or negative answer. For other problems, such as the 5th, experts have traditionally agreed on a single interpretation, and a solution to the accepted interpretation has been given, but closely related unsolved problems exist. Some of Hilbert's statements were not precise enough to specify a particular problem, but were suggestive enough that certain problems of contemporary nature seem to apply; for example, most modern number theorists would probably see the 9th problem as referring to the conjectural Langlands correspondence on representations of the absolute Galois group of a number field. Still other problems, such as the 11th and the 16th, concern flourishing mathematical subdisciplines, like the theories of quadratic forms and real algebraic curves.
There are two problems that are not only unresolved but may in fact be unresolvable by modern standards. The 6th problem concerns the axiomatization of physics, a goal that 20th-century developments seem to render both more remote and less important than in Hilbert's time. Also, the 4th problem concerns the foundations of geometry, in a manner that is generally judged to be too vague to enable a definitive answer.
The 23rd problem was purposefully set as a general indication by Hilbert to highlight the calculus of variations as an underappreciated and understudied field. In the lecture introducing these problems, Hilbert made the following introductory remark to the 23rd problem:
The other 20 problems have all received significant attention, and late into the 20th century work on these problems was still considered to be of the greatest importance. Paul Cohen received the Fields Medal in 1966 for his work on the first problem, and the negative solution of the tenth problem in 1970 by Yuri Matiyasevich (completing work by Julia Robinson, Hilary Putnam, and Martin Davis) generated similar acclaim. Aspects of these problems remain of great interest.
Knowability
Following Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, Hilbert sought to define mathematics logically using the method of formal systems, i.e., finitistic proofs from an agreed-upon set of axioms. One of the main goals of Hilbert's program was a finitistic proof of the consistency of the axioms of arithmetic: that is his second problem.