Soifer’s One-Hundred-Dollar Problem and Mitya Karabash

Abstract

In 2005, the brilliant young freshman from Columbia University Mitya Karabash came to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where I supervised his summer research. We looked at problems of tiling and covering, the chromatic number of the plane, and problems posed by Paul Erdős and me in this book, and wrote a joint research paper. Since then, we corresponded and wrote more joint papers. Mitya visited me several times at Princeton University. Mitya worked for years on the One-Hundred-Dollar Problem from this book, and we discussed his progress. Finally, on June 4, 2007, on the blackboard of my 7th floor Princeton office, Mitya showed me the most important result related to this book in the 18 years that have passed since its birth in 1990.