🚀 go-pugleaf

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!