FAQ
What is the Kourovka Notebook?
The Kourovka Notebook is a collection of unsolved problems in group theory. The idea of publishing such a collection was proposed by M. I. Kargapolov (1928–1976) at the Problem Day of the First All–Union (All–USSR) Symposium on Group Theory which took place in Kourovka, a small village near Sverdlovsk, on February, 16, 1965. This is why this collection acquired the name “Kourovka Notebook”. Since then every 2–4 years a new issue has appeared containing new problems and incorporating the problems from the previous issues with brief comments on the solved problems.
The problems on this website are sourced from the 21st edition of the Kourovka Notebook, which is freely available here.
What are some problem numbers missing?
According to the official Notebook, some problems were removed at the request of the authors either as ill-conceived, or as no longer topical, for example, due to the classification theorem of finite simple groups.
Who is behind the website?
The website was created and owned by Snow Listener. The website was vibe coded with Cursor, mainly using the agent OpenAI ChatGPT and Grok 4.5.
The website was inspired by Erdős Problems, and an arXiv paper, which reported that mathematician Marc Lackenby, working with Google AI Co-mathematician, successfully solved problem 21.10.
Since the I, the site owner, left math academia more than 10 years ago, I am not qualified to have a say on the correctness of new potential solutions, and I humbly call for career mathematicians, especially group theorists to become moderators of this site.
I am a career mathematician. How do I apply for moderator's role?
Please register with your institute's email, and use the tab [Apply for moderator] in your profile page.
What is your attitude towards AI?
I vehemently support the use of AI in math research, and am very excited at the prospect that AI could advance math to unimaginable new heights at unimaginable speed. This being said, however, people must take effort to understand what AI generates, and not take an plausible-looking, well-typeset AI gibberish for granted. If you are to post a potential solution to a problem generated by AI, please carefully read it through, and make sure you understand it. Please disclose AI use if there is any.
Some terminology in the problems, especially in early years, seems quite Russian-school. Maybe we should turn it into modern English terminology?
I should be careful with that, because I am not sure which terminology is the absolute standard in modern-day literature. Instead of changing individual terms, I plan to build a Definition page, which explains the Russian-school terms and give equivalent terms used by other mathematicians. If you come to a term X which other mathematicians call Y, Z, etc, you could report it in the comment section on the problem page.