Oxford Mathematician Ben Green on a tale of conjectures, mistaken assumptions and eventual solutions: a tale of mathematics.
"The famous discrete mathematician Ron Graham sadly passed away last year. I did not know him well, but I had the pleasure of meeting him a few times. On the first such occasion, in Vancouver in 2004, he mentioned one of his favourite open questions over lunch. This concerns the size of certain "van der Waerden numbers", a kind of arithmetic variant of graph Ramsey numbers.