An imponderable for the Nation:
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The famous Hungarian mathematician, Paul Erdos, did not rest until he found a short and elegant proof to a problem. Whenever he achieved this he would call it the "book proof." However, perhaps it is futile to search for short proofs in all cases, as we know (eg. from the theory of chaos) that seemingly simple things can generate great complexity. So can an information-theoretic approach be used to prove that there are infinitely many more problems with complex proofs than elegant proofs? Also I have a related question: if a proof is very long, can we really believe it? Can we use, again, an information-theoretic approach to produce a probabilistic confidence measure of the correctness of a proof that declines as the number of bits of information in the proof increases? Is there something special we can say when the number of bits of information in the shortest proof exceeds the number of bits of information in the shortest way of expressing the question?[/FONT]