Consider the birth of this problem, Kurt Gödel’s posthumously discovered 1956 letter to John von Neumann (http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/04/kurt-gdel-1906-1978.html), in which Gödel broaches the question as to whether there are degrees on unsolvability.

The open P vs. NP question is as “academic” as the closed problem of the halting problem’s undecidability. You can argue that a lot of undecidable problems are academic nonsense because they have practical answers, e.g., kill the program if it hangs for more than a minute. Indeed, that is what the mathematician suggested in the brunch conversation.

But I see these questions as fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. Maybe that makes me a naive academic. Certainly it makes me more of a computer scientist than a software engineer. And, to be clear, I’m not the one putting up $1M for a proof. But you can be sure that, if I live to see the question resolved, I will celebrate that day as a milestone in the history of computer science.

See my post Is P vs. NP a practical problem?.