Two kinds of passionflower (Passiflora) are climbing on our Grabov Rat cottage.

Have you ever wondered if anything new in math is left to nowadays mathematicians?

When Stan Ulam gave a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the computer, he made a mental calculation of the number of theorems published yearly in mathematical journals and threw out the number 100 thousand. "The audience gasped", Ulam recalled. "The next day two of the younger mathematicians in the audience came to tell me that impressed by this enormous figure they undertook a more systematic and detailed search in the Institute library. By multiplying the number of journals by the number of yearly issues, by the number of papers per issue, and the average number of theorems per paper, their estimate came to nearly two hundred thousand theorems a year. Such an enormous number should certainly give food for thought... If the number of theorems is larger than one can possibly survey, who can be trusted to judge what is ‘important’?"

"Today upwards of a quarter million theorems are published a year", said Graham.

Paul Hoffman: The man who loved only numbers, The story of Paul Erdös and the search for mathematical truth, Hyperion, New York, 1998.