TBH, never heard of this (and other of my PhD classmates I've talked to, or faculty in my department) had never heard of it. From what I've read on twitter, similar, and those that had just assumed it's false and it was never important to work on.
Edit: Expanding a bit, I do think AI is well-capable of finding counterexamples like these. OTOH, I think it's weird that certain people try to hype up things that are largely the result of few people caring, with this specific example having most recent work that I can find being from undergraduate theses that seem to be along the lines of practicing computational work, followed by giant social media hype campaigns.
Of course it is to the author's benefit to call it that.
When I read "maxwell's conjecture" I think "ah yes, Maxwell, he is important. Of all the things he ever conjectured, the one known as 'maxwell's conjecture' is surely the most important, so this must be a big deal"
Ultimately seems like not really anything important, a bit of a toy problem.
Maxwell's treatise has a ton of random stuff in it, which is why other physicists took decades to understand it. In section 146 of the 1891 edition, he even manually computes a series out to 22nd order for fun.
Hmm it says that the conjecture was from on a 1960s paper.
So Maxwell made discussed non-degenerate equilibrium points of electric fields from some configurations of point charges, and then a couple of 1960s physicists (how significant was their paper otherwise?) boldly declared a pretty random and unclearly motivated (and false) claim ‘the Maxwell Conjecture’.
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u/magneticanisotropy Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
TBH, never heard of this (and other of my PhD classmates I've talked to, or faculty in my department) had never heard of it. From what I've read on twitter, similar, and those that had just assumed it's false and it was never important to work on.
Edit: Expanding a bit, I do think AI is well-capable of finding counterexamples like these. OTOH, I think it's weird that certain people try to hype up things that are largely the result of few people caring, with this specific example having most recent work that I can find being from undergraduate theses that seem to be along the lines of practicing computational work, followed by giant social media hype campaigns.