Part of the goals of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs is to make available and open to the public thought-provoking and cutting-edge intellectual challenges on the major challenges facing today’s global community. On April 10, 2010 a special event took place at the WCFIA: “Hard Problems in Social Science” brought together some of the world’s most renown experts in multiple disciplines in order to enumerate and discuss what are the world’s hardest unresolved problems in the realm of social science. Included in the special line-up of extraordinary speakers were: Peter S. Bearman of Columbia University; Nick Bostrom of Oxford University; and Susan Carey of Harvard University.

The idea of organizing a discussion around the world’s most unsolvable problems was taken from the famous challenge of the great mathematician David Hilbert. In 1990 Mr. Hilbert picked 23 of the most difficult mathematical problems which are strikingly critical yet still unsolved as a challenge to future generations to find the solutions.