All you math buffs

[firemeboy]

I used to get my cutting edge math info here, but I got this off a church site! What is the GL coming to?

Anyway, have any of you heard anything about this?

quote:

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Evidence has been mounting since November 2002 that Grigori "Grisha" Perelman has cracked the 100-year-old problem, which seeks to explain the geometry of three-dimensional space.

If Perelman succeeded, he could be eligible for a $1 million prize offered by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Clay Mathematics Institute, formed to identify the world's seven toughest math problems.

Perelman is a researcher at St. Peterburg-based Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy. Colleagues describe him as brilliant and say he spent his formative years in the United States, then spent eight years quietly working in Russia without publishing any of his works in science journals.

Whether he attempts to collect the prize money is as much a mystery as the Poincare Conjecture itself. He did not respond to an e-mail query from The Associated Press and has declined interviews with other media in the past.

The institute's rules state that to collect on a proof, winners must publish their work in a science journal and withstand two years of scrutiny afterward.

Though Perelman emerged from relative seclusion last year and gave lectures to math experts at various U.S. colleges, he appears uninterested in submitting his work to a journal and has not openly discussed the prize money. He has instead posted three papers and corresponding data on a Web site.

Poincare made strides in understanding three-dimensional spaces — the kind, for instance, that an airplane flies through, made up of north-south, east-west and up-down measurements. His question, or conjecture, was whether two-dimensional calculations could be easily modified to answer similar questions about 3-D spaces. He was pretty sure the answer was yes but could not prove it mathematically.

Answering the question may help scientists better understand the shape of the universe.

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[The Ktulu]

Can't say I have, though it's very interesting. And just when I was losing my faith in math....

[jadesmar]

That is a terrible press release. All relevant information should be in the first paragraph.. for example, the name of the math problem that was allegedly solved.

Let's see, in paragraph four, they allude to the Poincare Conjecture,... nope, they don't actually say it.

Are we supposed to infer that the Poincare Conjecture is the 100-year old problem in question?

[Bicho the Inhaler]

This is old news. The article you posted suggests that it's more than a year old. Here's an article from last April: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/2003-04-15/poincare/

[firemeboy]

Thanks, the person posting in the other site did not give any reference to anything...

[firemeboy]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,107701,00.html

[firemeboy]

That article is from yesterday.