ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Kaplansky's conjectures

Okay kiddo, imagine you have a big puzzle with a lot of pieces. These pieces are numbers and equations that mathematicians have been trying to solve for a long time. One of the pieces or equations is something called Kaplansky's Conjectures.

Now, a conjecture is basically an idea that someone thinks might be true, but they haven't been able to prove it yet. So, Kaplansky's Conjectures are some ideas that a mathematician named Irving Kaplansky had about certain types of numbers called algebraic structures.

To understand algebraic structures, let's think of a tree with branches. Each branch of the tree represents a different type of algebraic structure like groups, rings, and fields. These structures help mathematicians understand how numbers work and how they relate to each other.

So, Kaplansky had some ideas about different algebraic structures and how they might be related to each other. He thought that certain structures might be related in ways that haven't been discovered yet. These ideas became known as Kaplansky's Conjectures.

Now, the tricky part is that no one has been able to prove these ideas are true or false. It's like having a really hard puzzle piece that you can't quite figure out where it fits. So, mathematicians keep working on Kaplansky's Conjectures and other puzzles like it, hoping to discover something new and exciting about numbers and algebraic structures.