B.

MAZUR

CONJECTURE

1. THE RISE OF CONJECTURE

A friend of mine recently told me that the Dutch word for Mathematics is
Wiskunde, a word coined in the 16th century by Simon Stevins. My friend
suggested that it was derived from “Wis” meaning “sure” and “kunde”
meaning “the study of”. Carrying this word back into English, we would
come up with something like “Sure-ology”. But even if the subject, Math-
ematics, is named “Sure-ology”, its history would be poorly described by
such a name. For like any Intellectual History, lots of the History of Math-
ematics is simply never captured: its major artifacts are ideas which spend
much of their life in a volatile, unrecorded, state. Their eventual distillation
as written record occurs long after their initial discovery.
The presence of “Conjecture” as a pointedly formal element in the syntax
of recent Mathematics may have the effect of counteracting this a bit, of
bottling some vapours of mathematical ideas at an earlier stage than was
previously done. Might this help in the historiography of Mathematics?
When Aki Kanamori telephoned me asking whether I might be inter-
1
ested in giving a talk in the BU conference, I had been reading a book
(Rapoport 1989) entitled Beilinson’s Conjectures on Special Values of L-
functions. Telephone receiver in hand, I was suddenly struck by the thought
that such a book, broadcasting “conjectures” in its very title, represents a
large change in the way mathematical theories are worked on; this change
has not been all that widely written about. At least I think it hasn’t. Here we
have a book in Pure Mathematics, a whole book, fully devoted to the
exposition of an extensive constellation of conjectures! It, and other math-
ematical works like it, signal that the art of conjecturing has achieved a
formidable, and quite formal, prominence in the mathematical landscape. I
believe that “formalization of conjecture” is a good thing for Mathematics,
and an inevitable thing, as large mathematical theories grow larger.
There is something perplexing and delicious when one finds a rarely
discussed theme which one imagines to be interesting. The temptation to
destroy its deliciousness by actually talking about it is then hard to resist!

Synthese 111: 197–210, 1997.

c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
198 B. MAZUR

My topic, then, is the growth of conjecture as a formal tool in Math-

ematics. I want to spend this hour wondering whether there is any good
History to be made, either by studying the manner in which this growth
has changed the face of Mathematics, or by studying the story of the
emergence of particular Conjectures. I realize, though, that to come up to
Philosophers or Historians of Mathematics, as I am about to do, with
suggestions of what I think are good topics to explore, may be no more
valuable than if a myna bird, truant from the aviary, were to alight on the
shoulder of an ornithologist, chirping suggestions about how to study its
species.
Even Imre Lakatos was silent on the subject of mathematical conjec-
turing. As Fernando Gouveaˆ explained to me, when Lakatos wanted to
do the analogue, in the history of mathematics, of Popper’s Conjectures
and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Lakatos named
his book Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery.
This is quite telling! For “conjecture” seems to play no role in Lakatos’
portrait of mathematical endeavor, despite the fact that Lakatos’ stance
regarding the question “what is mathematics about?” is that formal
mathematics is about informal mathematics, and the real question was
what the latter was talking about.

2. ARCHITECTURAL CONJECTURES

I have suggested that the prominence of Conjecture may be a relatively

new phenomenon on the mathematical scene. Of course, some manner of
conjecturing has always been present as a vital, but informal, penchant of
mathematicians: how else does any mathematics progress except by
questions whose answers are guessed at, except by waves of surmises?
But such “plausible reasoning” (to use Polya’s phrase) had been kept
somewhat to the sidelines until recently.
There have also always been open problems which are in every sense
conjectures; e.g., the classical “twin primes problem” to prove that there
are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers p, q with p q = 2.
Although the type of conjecturing I have in mind is not alien to such
open problems, it has a slightly different spirit: the conjectures I want to
discuss, or rather, to allude to, provide the skeletal architecture of a
Theory. For want of a better phrase, let us call them “architectural
conjectures”. What are they?
Architectural conjectures are mathematically precise assertions, as well-
milled as minted coins, provisionally usable in the commerce of logical
arguments; less than ‘coins’ and more aptly, promissory notes to be paid in
 CONJECTURE 199

full by some future demonstration, or to be contradicted. These conjectures

are expected to turn out to be true, as, of course, are all conjectures; their
formulation is often a way of “formally” packaging, or at least acknowledg-
ing, an otherwise shapeless body of mathematical experience that points to
their truth. From these conjectures, implications may be perfectly rig-
orously made. Best, if the conjectures are, loosely speaking, “testable", or
“falsifiable” in the sense that they imply a stream of particular, numerical
perhaps, predictions many of which may be directly checked. But these
conjectures are architectural in that they play the role of “joists” and “sup-
porting beams” for some larger mathematical structure yet to be made.
These conjectures sometimes round out a field by being clear, general (but
not yet proved) statements enabling one to understand where a cer-tain
amount of on-going, perhaps fragmentary, specialized work is headed; they
provide a focus. Their formulation sometimes serve to “allow the field to
proceed”: a research program may continue, conditional on the truth of these
statements, in order to see what lies further down the road. One effect of the
formalization of Conjecture is to give concrete language
– “a local habitation and a name” – to expectations, analogies, hoped-for
constructions, etc., long before the methods needed for their elucidation
are available, giving us a rich source of palpable “historical artifacts”
about ideas at an early stage in their development.
Take the Beilinson Conjectures referred to above. No one thinks that
they and the issues they raise will be resolved in this century. But some
people feel that their very formulation lights a way, unifies a research
program. Merely to formulate these conjectures, one must set up a good
deal of mathematics. Much work was needed to be done for this (indeed,
including the demonstration of Theorems, Propositions, Lemmas,
interest-ing in themselves). All this just to convince a reader that there is
internal, at least, consistency and coherence to this constellation of
conjectures. All this work in aid of the Conjectures, the main
protagonists of the narrative which may – (may!) – eventually be fleshed
out with demonstrations to become a full-fledged theory.

3. CAUTIONS ABOUT CONJECTURE

Having spoken out “for” conjecture, perhaps I should also quote some
cautionary prose about its careless practice. The author here is Andre´
Weil, who in the notes he wrote as addenda to his Collected Works (Weil
1979) gives himself
2
l’occasion de dire mon sentiment sur ce mot [conjecture ] dont on a tant use´ et abuse´. Sans
cesse le mathematicien´ se dit: “Ce serait bien beau” (ou: “Ce serait bien commode”)
200 B. MAZUR

si telle ou telle chose etait´ vraie. Parfois il le verifie´ sans trop de peine; d’autre fois il ne
tarde pas a` se detromper´. Si son intuition a resist´e´ quelques temps a` ses efforts, il
tend a` parler de “conjecture”, memeˆ si la chose a peu d’importance en soi. : : : En tout
cas, s’il m’appartenait de donner un conseil a` qui ne m’en demande point, je
recommanderais d’employer desormais´ le mot de “conjecture” avec un peu plus de
circonspection que dans ces derniers temps.

Rough translation:
: : : the occasion to vent my feelings regarding that word [conjecture] which has been
very much used and abused. The mathematician continually says “it would be beautiful”
(or: “it would be convenient”) if this or that were true. Sometimes he verifies it without
too much trouble; on other occasions he loses no time in correcting his misapprehension.
If the thing resists his efforts for some while, he tends to call it a “conjecture” even if it
has little importance in itself. In any event, if it is up to me to give advice (to those who
never asked for it) I would recommend using the word “conjecture” with a bit more
circumspection than has been done recently.

But perhaps there are other reasons to be wary, as well. During the pan-
el discussion at the BU colloquium, David Kazhdan, responding to the
statement that “conjecture” is a way for present-day researchers to
imprint their intent, their goals, on future researchers, cautioned that if
the practice achieved too much prominence, it, like the “five-year plans”
of the former Soviet Union might eventually have a stultifying effect.
Assuming, for a moment, that “conjecture” has achieved the position
in Mathematics that I claim it has, what are the forces at play which
contribute to the rise of conjecture? Here are some possibilities:

4. CONJECTURE AND AXIOMATIC METHOD

Perhaps the growth of conjecture just mirrors the growth of modern

axiomatic method. This is only reasonable in that the two developments
are surely close cousins, or perhaps, twins; their kinship is particularly
vivid in the following description of mathematical “conjecturing” given
by David Hilbert in 1920 (after a discussion in which he distinguishes
3
three types of conjecture – Vermutungen – occurring in Physics ).
Vielmehr habe ich ja bereits bei der Erorterung¨ der Methode der Mathematik betont,
dass es ein durchaus berechtigtes Verfahren ist, wenn man beim Aufbau einer speziellen
Theorie gewisse noch unbeweisene, aber plausible Satze¨ (als Axiome) voranstellt,
sofern man sich nur uber¨ die Unvollstandigkeit¨ der Begrundungsweise¨ im klaren ist.

Rough translation:
: : : I already emphasized in discussion of the methods of Mathematics that it is a thoroughly
legitimate procedure to construct some special theory dependent upon admittedly unproven,
 CONJECTURE 201

but plausible, theorems (as axioms), provided one is clear about the incomplete nature of
the foundations of that theory.

(from x8 of Hilbert 1992).

“Axiomatic method” is a frame of mind thoroughly established in
mod-ern mathematics; it is also a broad umbrella covering a number of
things: there is its use in establishing axiom systems to categorize some
specific geometry, like hyperbolic geometry or some theory such as set
theory; there is its use in the formulation of the collection of axioms
comprising the definition of some species of object, like a group. That
this ubiquitous method should extend ever so slightly further to
encourage the construction of systems of “unproven, but plausible,
theorems (as axioms)” as alluded to in the Hilbert quotation (i.e., of the
type of architectural conjecturing that I want to focus on) should be no
surprise. Perhaps the only surprise is that as late as 1920, Hilbert still felt
called upon to “emphasize” its “thoroughly legitimate nature”.

5. CONJECTURE AS MOTIVATED BY “ANALOGY”

If one had to single out one driving source responsible for important con-
jecturing, the most potent is simply “analogy”. Algebra is “like”
Geometry and perceiving this analogy, one (Weil, in fact) developed the
classical “Weil Conjectures” of Algebraic Geometry which predicted an
arsenal of topological tools, fixed point theorems, etc., to be used to
count numbers of solutions of equations over finite fields.
4
Complex function theory is “like” Arithmetic and perceiving this
analo-gy, one (Paul Vojta, in fact) developed the more recent “Vojta
Conjectures” which give very precise arithmetic predictions concerning
the structure of solutions of equations over the ring of integers, and the
field of rational numbers.
Concerning the romance of analogy in mathematics and its inevitable
end, listen to Weil:

Rien n’est plus fecond,´ tous les mathematiciens´ le savent, que ces obscures analogies, ces
troubles reflets d’une theorie´ a` une autre, ces furtives caresses, ces brouilleries inexplicables;
rien aussi ne donne plus de plaisir au chercheur. Un jour vient ou` l’illusion se dissipe; le
pressentiment se change en certitude; les theories´ jumelles rev´elent` leur source commune
avant de disparaˆitre; comme l’enseigne la Gita on atteint a` la connaissance et a`
l’indifference´ en memeˆ temps. La metaphysique´ est devenue mathematique,ˆ preteˆ a`
former la matiere` d’un traite´ dont la beaute´ froide ne saurait plus nous emouvoir´.

Rough translation:
202 B. MAZUR

Nothing is more fruitful – all mathematicians know it – than those obscure analogies, those
disturbing reflections of one theory on another; those furtive caresses, those inexplicable
discords; nothing also gives more pleasure to the researcher. The day comes when this illusion
dissolves: the presentiment turns into certainty; the yoked theories reveal their common source
before disappearing. As the Gita teaches, one achieves knowledge and indifference at the same
time. Metaphysics has become Mathematics, ready to form the material of some treatise whose
cold beauty has lost the power to move us.

(from ‘De la metaphysique´ aux mathematiques’´ 1960, in volume II of

Weil 1979).

6. CONJECTURE FOLLOWING FROM THE EMERGENCE OF “PRECISELY

FORMULATED RESEARCH PROGRAMS” IN MATHEMATICS

What is a “research program”? It is an attempt of the present to lay down

architectural plans for the construction of future theories.
Let us restrict attention to the research programs in Mathematics which
have “names”, are well-advertised, have clear goals, and formulations. There
have been many of these in recent times. The program for the classification
of finite simple groups is a perfect example. An earlier such research
program, if less precise, is the “Erlangen program” (to understand geometry
as group theory). There is also the famous letter (1880) from Kronecker to
Dedekind in which Kronecker’s program, his Jugendtraum, appears, which
eventually is reformulated as Hilbert’s Twelfth Problem.
And there are all twenty-three of Hilbert’s famous Problems
presented to the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians, in Paris
(Hilbert 1902). The Hilbert Problems, taken as a whole, were written in
celebration of the unity of Mathematics, as Hilbert proclaims in the
epilogue to the lecture in which he presented his Problems:
: : : the question is urged upon us whether mathematics is doomed to the fate of those other
sciences that have split into several branches, and whose connection become ever more loose.
I do not believe this nor wish it. Mathematical science is in my opinion an indivisible whole,
an organism whose vitality is conditioned upon the connection of its parts : : :

One of the impressive things about the Hilbert Problems is that many of
them bridge the gap between what one might call “problem-oriented
research” and “programmatic research”. Some of them are simply “prob-
lems” of a traditional nature. I read Hilbert’s beautiful and quite open-ended
16th problem about the nestedness of the connected components of a real
algebraic curve, and the limit cycles of differential equations, as being of
that sort. But underlying the formulation of the entire collection of Prob-
lems is the clear aim of setting programmatic directions, of forecasting large
theories and research programs. If you doubt this, just consider the
 CONJECTURE 203

direction taken by the American Mathematical Society volume (Browder

1976) devoted to revisiting the Hilbert Problems 75 years after they were
first formulated where, for example, Hilbert’s 9th and 12th Problems are
presented as the seeds of a good deal of modern arithmetic (the modern
theory of L-functions, algebraic K-theory, the Langlands program, auto-
morphic forms and the theory of Shimura varieties); where Hilbert’s 6th
Problem is credited with “putting its finger on one of the most profound
themes” in the modern developments in Mathematical Physics.
Is it reasonable to take the turn of the present century, especially with
the impetus given by the enormously influential Hilbert Problems, as
being the moment when the full and public expression of “research
programs in mathematics” – and hence also “architectural conjectures” –
became commonplace? If so, are there broader cultural developments of
the time, that mirror, or favor, this flowering of research programs?
In the discussion period after my lecture, David Rowe made the sug-
gestion that it was very directly the personality of Hilbert (as expressed in
his 23 Problems) that was instrumental in gathering a large follow-ing for
research programs in mathematics. Here was an occasion where a
mathematician, broadly admired, with eloquent public voice, made the
attempt to put on a “public footing” many of the mathematical visions,
plans, hopes, surmises, that were, up to that time, worked on by relatively
few people. Rowe pointed out that few other spokesmen among the math-
ematicians would have had the urge to bring a wider mathematical public
into the circle of ideas that had been, up to that point, the privy of private
correspondence and disparate published articles.

7. “PROBLEM-ORIENTED” versus “PROGRAMMATIC” RESEARCH

I couldn’t help phrasing things in the previous section as if there were

some stark contrast in these two modes of doing mathematics. But I
don’t feel there to be a serious “versus” separating them. Mathematics is
a long conversation between problem-solvers and theory-builders, those
5
“foxes” and “hedgehogs” that inhabit all the sciences. And this
conversation, far from being adversarial, often takes the form of an
internal dialogue in the mind of a single researcher.
Nevertheless, as a number of people have commented to me, the ratio
Problem-solving/theory-building depends very much on which
discipline, within mathematics, one considers: there are important areas
in mathe-matics which are quite unamenable to theory-building, to large
research programs, and consequently these areas see little “architectural
conjectur-ing”.
204 B. MAZUR

8. THE UR-POINCARE´ CONJECTURE

Even if one thinks of the Hilbert Problems as giving the “research pro-
grammatic” spirit a serious boost, one can also see this spirit arising with
much energy in a number of different mathematical works at the turn of the
century. Consider, for example, the way in which Poincare´ first asks (in
Poincare´ 1953, his 1895 article ‘Analysis Situs’) the question that eventu-
ally became focussed (and corrected in the fifth complement to that article)
giving rise to what we now call the (three-dimensional) “Poincare´ Conjec-
ture”. Poincares´ article represents the birth of modern algebraic topology.
He had constructed the fundamental group of a manifold earlier in the arti-
cle, and then writes that “it would be interesting to treat” three questions. To
paraphrase them, Poincare’s´ questions are:
Given any group, is it the fundamental group of a manifold in n dimensions? How can
one construct that manifold? Is the manifold determined by its fundamental group?

To be sure, any present-day student of Topology will be able to comment

on the status of these questions. Nevertheless, despite the fact that
Poincare´ considerably underestimates the complexity of the field that he
is fathering, he is setting forth in this series of questions a research
program which (once appropriately rephrased) remains today the driving
force of that field: to capture homeomorphy of manifolds by algebraic
invariants. In a sense then, this original formulation, despite the fact that
it is technically wrong, has quite a contemporary programmatic quality.
Although Poincares´ questions might very well cut out a “research
pro-gram” they do not yet constitute “architectural conjecturing”. To
push the architectural metaphor one might say that Poincare,´ in posing
his ques-tions, has cordoned off the construction site, but still hasn’t
revealed the plans of construction. It is time for me, then, to stop fitting
so well into the caricature of “mathematician who can talk for great
lengths about some abstract concept without feeling called upon to
provide a single example”. In the next section I will hint, at the very
least, at one instance of an architectural conjecture.

9. THE WEIL CONJECTURES

The work on these famous conjectures dating from the 40’s, parts of which
were resolved by Bernard Dwork, and by Alexander Grothendieck who set
up a formidable apparatus to deal with them, was completed by Pierre
Deligne in 1974. The conjectures provide a bridge between the fields of
algebraic topology and number theory. To talk about this bridge with a
 CONJECTURE 205

minimum of technical vocabulary, let me begin by reviewing two “core

theorems”, one in algebraic topology and one in number theory.
Algebraic Topology: The theorem in algebraic topology which may
be thought of as the single kernel which contains many of the essentials
of algebraic topology is the Brouwer fixed point theorem. This Brouwer
fixed point theorem guarantees that any continuous function from a
closed simplex (of any dimension) onto itself must have (at least one)
fixed point. In dimension one, for example, the theorem says that any
continuous function f from the closed unit interval [0, 1] (in the real line)
to itself has a fixed point; i.e., there is a solution to the equation f(x) = x.
This instance of the theorem can be seen to follow from the intermediate
value theorem of Calculus applied to the function f(x) x which is non-
negative at x = 0 and non-positive at x = 1.
But I referred to this Brouwer fixed point theorem as a “kernel” and
indeed it is, for it fits comfortably into a much larger matrix of results (e.g.,
the Lefschetz fixed point theorem) which “count”, in a suitable sense, the
“number” of fixed points that any continuous mapping f: X ! X has, where X
is any reasonable topological space. The mechanism to set up and prove this
larger matrix of results is the nuts and bolts of algebraic topology, and the
“count” is made by computing the traces of certain linear transformations.
One important feature of this “count” is that, there is only a certain finite
amount of initial data that you need compute, to get (in closed form) the
number of fixed points of each of the infinitely many mappings fn (n = 1, 2,
3, : : : ) where fn is the nth iterate of the mapping
f.
Number Theory: Here is the simple result in number theory that I
want to single out. Let p be a prime number. Let K be any algebraically
closed field such that p 1 = 0 (i.e., of characteristic p). Let f : K ! K be the
mapping which raises any element in K to the pth power, f(x) = xp. Then
the fixed points of f n, the nth iterate of f, form a (finite) subfield Kn in
K consisting of pn elements.
The mapping f above is, in fact, a symmetry of the field K. The “legacy”
for number theory of this elementary result that I quoted above is that one
may view the set of solutions of any finite system of polynomial equations
over Kn, as being the fixed points of the function fn acting on the set of
solutions of that system of equations in K. Can one then – just as one counts
fixed points of continuous mappings in algebraic topology – count the
number of solutions of a system of equations over fields consisting in pn
elements? Is there also – just as in algebraic topology – only a finite amount
of initial data that you need compute, to get (in close form) the
206 B. MAZUR

number of solutions of a system of equations over fields of cardinality pn

for the infinitely many positive integer values of n?
These are the questions of concern for the “easy part” of the Weil
Conjectures: the “hard part” goes even further. What these questions call
for is to set up the bridge between those two theories, so as to transport
from algebraic topology to number theory the vast and explicitly
describable mechanisms of algebraic topology. The aim of this is to
prove the analogue, in number theory, of the Lefschetz fixed point
theorem and then to make the desired count of numbers of solutions of
systems of polynomial equations over finite fields. All this conjectural
architecture, motivated by the analogy sketched above, was originally
formulated by Weil, and resolved only decades later.
If, indeed, the practice of formal conjecturing is as new as is
suggested here, it might be fun to ask about the usage of the word itself
in the mathematical literature.

10. HOW NEW IS THE MATHEMATICAL USE OF THE LABEL “CONJECTURE”?

Mathematics can hardly be accused of being subject to fadishness in the

vocabulary it uses to label its logical statements. Throughout the
centuries it has shown parsimony and faithfulness in its choice of terms.
Mathemati-cians have made do, for the most part, with Lemma,
Proposition, Theorem, Corollary as labels for things they have actually
proved, or thought they’ve proved. For the things not proved, the choice
6
is Axiom, Postulate, Question, Problem, Hypothesis and Conjecture. Of
these, the newcomer seems to be Conjecture, all the other words having
done long service in Science and in Mathematics.
Take the word Problem. Hardly a mathematical or scientific text
neglects to use this word which is allowed to label any mental task set by
the author, or thrown to the reader. The last book of Euclid’s Elements
ends with the series of Problems leading to the construction of the five
regular solids, while the first modern treatise on Algebra (Vieta’s
7
Introduction to the Analytical Art ) ends by announcing that Algebra
appropriates to itself by right the proud problem of problems, which is:
TO LEAVE NO PROBLEM UNSOLVED.

Or take the word Hypothesis.

I make no hypotheses!
proclaimed Newton. But mathematicians surely did make them from early
on: at the time of the writing of Plato’s dialogue Meno the activity of
 CONJECTURE 207

mathematical hypothesizing was already subject to some scrutiny, as in

8
the enigmatic description of it given by Socrates in Meno (86E–87A):

I mean “by hypothesis” ["’ ‘ o " "!s] what the geometricians often do in dealing with a
question put to them; for example, whether a certain figure is capable of being inscribed
as a [: : : ] in a given circle: they reply- “I cannot yet tell whether it has that capability;
but I think, if I may put it so, that I have a helpful hypothesis for the problem, and it is as
follows: If [: : : ] then it seems to me that we can conclude one thing, but if [ : : : ] then
some other. Hypothesizing thus, I will tell you the conclusion about the inscription of it
in the circle, whether it is impossible or not”.

If you are puzzled by exactly what the activity of “hypothesizing” is, that
is described in the above quotation, you are not alone. There is a vast
9
secondary literature related to this paragraph:
That “hypothesis” – however it was employed by the mathematicians
– was not a thoroughly harmless device in the eyes of Plato’s Socrates of
10
Book VI of The Republic is clear from the pronouncement (511 D):

And though it is true that [ : : : the mathematicians : : : ] are compelled to use their under-
standing and not their senses, yet because they do not go back to the beginning [ "’ ’ ] [
: : : ] but start from hypotheses you do not think they possess true understanding : : : .

Letting aside the meaning of the word hypothesis in ancient mathematics,

which is clearly a complex issue, it is difficult enough to catalogue the span
of meanings the word hypothesis is allowed in modern mathematics. The
Riemann Hypothesis, for example, is in every sense, a conjecture!
The noun Conjecture which comes from the Latin conjectura (thrown
+ together?) meaning “conclusion” or “inference” has steadily retained
one of its standard meanings,

an opinion or supposition based on evidence which is

admittedly insufficient,

in general colloquial use through the ages. But it seems to have entered the
scientific or mathematical vocabulary only recently. Since I am not a his-
torian of Mathematics I dare not make any serious pronouncements about
the historical use of the term, but I have not come across any appearance of
11
the word Conjecture or its equivalent in other languages with the above
12
meaning in mathematical literature except in the twentieth century. The
earliest use of the noun conjecture in mathematical writing that I have
encountered is in Hilbert’s 1900 address, where it is used exactly once, in
reference to Kronecker’s Jugendtraum.
208 B. MAZUR

11. CONJECTURE AND THE TOLERATION OF UNCERTAINTY

A friend of mine suggested that a possible reason for our being so at

home with conjecture, in modern times, is simply that we have more
experience nowadays in dealing with various aspects of uncertainty on a
theoretical level. If this is so, one might ask further to catalogue the
manner(s) in which we acquired this experience.
Is it that we have come to terms with the possible logical incomplete-
nesses of a Godelian¨ nature that might lurk behind the questions we
ask? I suspect that, in fact, neither have we done so, nor have we much
need-ed to do so, even though it is only the rare mathematician who
could, in the present day, ignore Godel¨ enough to share Hilbert’s
conviction, which (Hilbert wrote)
: : : every mathematician shares, but which no one has as yet supported by a proof – that
every mathematical problem must necessarily be susceptible of an exact settlement.

Or is it that we are simply more at home with large theories, Gaud-iesque

cathedrals, that are incomplete, and whose eventual dimensions are
uncertain, by virtue of their very grandeur. And yet we must deal with these
theories in some orderly way. If so, instead of thinking of “conjecture” as
temporary scaffolding, to be removed upon being replaced by theorems, we
might expect that as our experience widens, we will replace proved
constellations of conjectures with ever bolder ones.

12. CONJECTURE AND STANDARDS OF RIGOR

In response to an early draft of this essay, Colin McClarty sent me these

13
comments:
Descartes clearly offers his GEOMETRY as a new “architecture” for math. But it is not
at all “conjectural”. Descartes signals no difference between his few detailed proofs, his
handwaving, and his really groundless claims (esp. about reducing polynomials of high
degree). There was no way he could make such distinctions clear at a time when there
were no generally adopted standards of rigor (outside of certain parts of arithmetic and
Euclidean geometry).
Maybe the first important awareness of “architectural conjectures” per se was in Gauss
– who rejected them, at least for his own work. His “pauca sed matura” proclaims not
only that he will publish good proofs, but that he will let no work out of his hands until
he has answered all the basic questions it suggests.
Riemann necessarily reversed this. He (building on Gauss’s work, of course, and others)
opened up fields far too large to hope for a final “maturity” in his lifetime and his complex
analysis is a program of “architectural conjecture” in exactly your sense. He even specified
that his proofs were inadequate, as most used the Dirichlet principle in a form which
Weierstrass has shown to be actually false. But Riemann does not call this “conjecture”.
 CONJECTURE 209

Why not? I think it was that even in Riemann’s time there was too little agreement on
standards of proof. Even the handful of professors of math in Germany could not agree
with each other on which purported proofs of Riemann–Roch were good and which were
useless.
To distinguish conjectures from proofs you need generally accepted standards. These
need not be “right” in any given sense, certainly need not be formal. But they need to be
generally accepted to give a meaningful distinction.
Hilbert could talk about “conjectures” because the Gottingen¨ school at his time was
developing a shared standard and intended to impose it on the profession – and in fact
their standard evolved in a fairly continuous line through Noether and van der Waerden
to Bourbaki.
So this brings me back to your Gaudiesque cathedrals. Shared standards of rigor can only
arise where there are large shared projects, and vice versa. I come to think of “cathedrals” and
“rigor” as the social and theoretical sides (respectively) of one development”.

NOTES
1 For which this article is the written text.
2 Anything occurring in square brackets [: : : ] within some text I am quoting is either an
indication that I have omitted some words, or else is a comment of mine.
3 I am thankful to Leo Corry for mentioning this to me, and for enlightening observations
about it.
4 Specifically, the theory of Nevanlinna.
5 As in the fragment of the ancient poem by Archilocus of Paros: “The fox knows many
things. But the hedgehog knows one big thing”.
6 As Robert Kaplan pointed out to me, there are a few other labels, some no longer in
use, like the Greek porism (which, according to the footnote on page 9 of (Lakatos 1981)
refers to a result which was incidentally, or accidentally, arrived at on the way to
something else). Kaplan suggests that we might distinguish two strains in the tradition of
mathemat-ical labelling: one strain being distinctly subjective, or “biographical” ( as in
labels like porism which commemorate historical events in the theory’s development, or
as in the discriminating use of the word axiom as opposed to postulate) and the other
strain being “architectural” (as in the standard use of lemma). The most telling example
of “historical” labelling that I can think of occurs in the Gettysburg Address, where the
self-evident truth of the Declaration of Independence (that all men are created equal) is
re-asserted as a Proposition (Lincoln’s grim choice of words emphasizing that he is,
indeed, putting it to the proof).
7 An English translation of this treatise occurs as the appendix to (Klein 1968).
8 The English translation given is by W. R. M. Lamb (Plato 1927).
9 I want to thank Robert Kaplan for his unpublished manuscript “A short history of the
unknown” which contains a discussion of this paragraph in a broader context.
10 The English translation given is by Paul Shorey (Plato 1935).
11 For example, in German, Vermutung: What is the earliest occurrence of the
label “Rie-mannsche Vermutung” for the Riemann Hypothesis, for example? As for
Greek, it seems that there is no word which cleanly corresponds to conjecture. If, in the
crudest way, one were to try to haul the word conjecture into Greek by force, one might
expect to end up with a nominalized form of the verb " (?). Does such a word occur in
the Greek mathematical literature?
210 B. MAZUR

12 Nicolas of Oresme does use the term “conjectura” in his treatise ‘The
Geometry of Qual-ities of Motion’ but when he uses it, he means “prophesying”.
13 Which I am reproducing with his approval.

REFERENCES

Browder, F. (ed.): 1976, Mathematical Developments Arising from Hilbert’s Problems,

Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics XXVII, American Mathematical
Society, Providence, RI.
Hilbert, D.: 1902, ‘Mathematical Problems’, M. W. Newson (trans.), Bulletin of the
Amer-ican Mathematical Society 8, 537–79. (republished in Browder 1976, pp.1–34).
Hilbert, D.: 1992, Natur und mathematisches Erkennen, Birkhauser,¨
Klein, J.: 1968, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, E. Brann
(trans.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Lakatos, I.: 1981, in J. Worrall and E. Zahar (eds.), Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of
Mathematical Discoveries, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Plato: 1927, Meno, W. R. M. Lamb (trans.), Loeb Classical Library No. 165, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Plato: 1935, The Republic, P. Shorey (trans.), Loeb Classical Library No. 276, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA.
´
´

Poincare, H.: 1895, ‘Analysis Situ’, Journal de l’Ecole Polytechnique; reprinted in

Oeuvres VI, Gauthiers-Villars, Paris.
Popper, K.: 1962, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge,
Basic Books, New York.
Rapoport, M., N. Schappacher, and P. Schneider: 1988, Beilinson’s Conjectures on Special
Values of L- functions. Perspectives in Mathematics, Vol. 4, Academic Press, London.
Weil, A.: 1979, Ouevres Scientifiques – Collected Papers, Vols. I–III, Springer-Verlag,
Berlin.
Department of Mathematics
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
U.S.A.