After almost 20 years, math problem falls

After almost 20 years, math problem falls: Convexity is such a useful property that, in 1992, when a major conference on optimization selected the seven most important outstanding problems in the field, one of them was whether the convexity of an arbitrary polynomial function could be efficiently determined.
Almost 20 years later, researchers in MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems have finally answered that question. Unfortunately, the answer, which they reported in May with one paper at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Optimization, is no.