The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in computer science. Informally speaking, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified by a computer can also be quickly solved by a computer.
The underlying issues were first discussed in the 1950s, in letters from John Forbes Nash Jr. to the National Security Agency, and from Kurt Gödel to John von Neumann. The precise statement of the P versus NP problem was introduced in 1971 by Stephen Cook in his seminal paper "The complexity of theorem proving procedures" and is considered by many to be the most important open problem...