Category Archive 'Topology'

16 Aug 2006

Poincaré Conjecture Proven

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The New York Times reports that Grigory Perelman has, at length, provided three papers evidencing his claim to have proven the veracity of Poincaré’s Conjecture:

Every simply connected closed three-manifold is homeomorphic to the three-sphere, where a three-sphere is simply a generalization of the usual sphere to one dimension higher.

Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.

After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right.

Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them.

As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought.


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