A Prize for the Darkest Wizards of All

I was watching a dubbed video about symmetry while reviewing Spanish for my upcoming bright future (great video by the way, if you speak Spanish then I highly recommend it), when I stumbled upon something very interesting (at least to me). If you are up to date with the scientific community then this is far from news, but as some of you may be aware, almost 12 years ago the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts (CMI) created an academic competition of sorts, in hopes of raising interest in mathematics among the general public - the Seven Millennium Prize Problems.

The seven Millennium Prize Problems were chosen by the founding Scientific Advisory Board of CMI, which conferred with leading experts worldwide. The focus of the board was on important classic questions that have resisted solution for many years.

Whoever solves any single problem gets $1,000,000 and if you solve all seven then you get the whole $7,000,000. In March 18, 2010, the first $1,000,000 was awarded to some russian for solving the Poincaré conjecture - that means there's only $6,000,000 left for the taking.

I am far from well versed in mathematics, and the odds of me solving one of these problems may be less favorable than that of winning the lottery, but I've been looking for a motivator to master this black magic (as my dad used to call it when I was little in order to get me excited about learning it) and I gotta tell you; after learning about this, I got about six million motives to lurk the mathematics section in B&N more often.