Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery

New York Times ^ | August 15, 2006 | DENNIS OVERBYE

[Lil'freeper]

Pingy!

[Red Badger]

I think therefore I FReep.............

[Red Badger]

Have you ever seen a one sided figure?

Yes, They're called Liberals..........

[Red Badger]

The alimentary canal? Isn't that in Upstate NY?...........

[Constitution Day]

to read later.

[pageonetoo]

pie are square..

[chilepepper]

we are donuts but the demonicrats are the ones with the yellow jelly guts

[Fairview]

I'd be interested to know if this proof has any practical implications or uses.

Does art have any practical applications or uses? Classical music? Great literature? They ennoble mankind by their very existence.

And sometimes these things do end up having practical applications, many years down the road. I know mathematicians and physicists who study arcane branches of math and then apply them to the development of computer science. (Don't ask me how, I have no idea exactly what they're doing; they might as well be speaking Urdu for all I can understand of it.)

[Lazamataz]

I hate apples and donuts.

[JCEccles]

And the mouth and anus are not two holes, but two ends of one hole, the alimentary canal.

So a rabbit is a doughnut.

And a door is a jar.

Mathematics is fascinating.

[Constitution Day]

LOL.

[RussP]

You remind me of the idiots who reply to something I didn't even say. I did *not* say or imply that the theoretical aspect of it was unimportant. I merely asked if it had any practical significance. By the way, I scored in the top 1% on the GRE exam, taken by engineers to get into graduate school.

[UpToHere]

This is all fascinating. All Mathematics can be explained through nature in relation to pi. Duh...

I tried to explain that to my grandfather, when I was a kid just out of the third grade. I told him about learning "pi r square". Didn't take him but a few seconds to correct me, "pi are round. Cornbread are square."

Of course this was in the thirtys.

Al

[TChris]

To a topologist, a rabbit is the same as a sphere. Neither has a hole.

Aparently, topologists don't ever pass basic anatomy. A rabbit does have a hole. Every animal that eats does as well.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

In its original form, the Poincaré conjecture states that every simply connected closed three-manifold is homeomorphic to the three-sphere (in a topologist's sense) , where a three-sphere is simply a generalization of the usual sphere to one dimension higher. More colloquially, the conjecture says that the three-sphere is the only type of bounded three-dimensional space possible that contains no holes.

This conjecture was first proposed in 1904 by H. Poincaré (Poincaré 1953, pp. 486 and 498), and subsequently generalized to the conjecture that every compact -manifold is homotopy-equivalent to the -sphere iff it is homeomorphic to the -sphere. The generalized statement reduces to the original conjecture for.

In case anyone was wondering.

[phantomworker]

First math article in a long time.

[PatrickHenry]

First math article in a long time.

True. This calls for a math ping.

[longshadow]

homeomorphic placemarker

[sportutegrl]

At least I didn't insult you by implying you were an id10t. Oh well, I guess I deserve it, since I am just a simple, clueless undergrad (BSEE) of the type that voted for Bush in much greater numbers than our superior overlords that went to GRAD SCHOOL.

[Erasmus]

To a topologist, a rabbit is the same as a sphere. Neither has a hole. Longitude and latitude lines on the rabbit allow mathematicians to map it onto different forms while preserving information.

At a slightly greater level of anatomical detail, it's a torus.