Posted on 08/14/2006 11:26:41 PM PDT by neverdem
Grisha Perelman, where are you?
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 worlds 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.
Its really a great moment in mathematics, said Bruce Kleiner of Yale, who has spent the last three years helping to explicate Dr. Perelmans work. It could have happened 100 years from now, or never.
In a speech at a conference in Beijing this summer, Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard said the understanding of three-dimensional space brought about by Poincarés conjecture could be one of the major pillars of math in the 21st century.
Quoting Poincaré himself, Dr.Yau said, Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but the flash that means everything.
But at the moment of his putative triumph, Dr. Perelman is nowhere in sight. He is an odds-on favorite to win a Fields Medal, maths version of the Nobel Prize, when the International Mathematics Union convenes in Madrid next Tuesday. But there is no indication whether he will show up.
Also left hanging...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Pingy!
I think therefore I FReep.............
Yes, They're called Liberals..........
The alimentary canal? Isn't that in Upstate NY?...........
to read later.
we are donuts but the demonicrats are the ones with the yellow jelly guts
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.)
I hate apples and donuts.
So a rabbit is a doughnut.
And a door is a jar.
Mathematics is fascinating.
LOL.
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.
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
Aparently, topologists don't ever pass basic anatomy. A rabbit does have a hole. Every animal that eats does as well.
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.
First math article in a long time.
True. This calls for a math ping.
homeomorphic placemarker
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.
At a slightly greater level of anatomical detail, it's a torus.
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