🚀 go-pugleaf

Holly wrote:
> Put down your socks and get ready to get yer priZe!
> 
> "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."
> 
> 
> Poincaré's conjecture:  "It asserts that if any loop in a certain
> kind of three-dimensional space can be shrunk to a point without
> ripping or tearing either the loop or the space, the space is
> equivalent to a sphere. "
> 
> "In effect, what Poincaré suggested was that anything without holes
> has to be a sphere. The one qualification was that this "anything"
> had to be what mathematicians call compact, or closed, meaning that it
> has a finite extent: no matter how far you strike out in one direction
> or another, you can get only so far away before you start coming back,
> the way you can never get more than 12,500 miles from home on the
> Earth."
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/science/15math.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
> 
> Now this is exciting!

Considering the intractable n≥7, it's no surprise.
-- 
ah