Manifold Destiny: The battle for the solution to the Poincaire conjecture
Sylvia Nasar is John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University, and the author of A Beautiful Mind, the story of ProfessorJohn Nash Jr., who won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for his contribution to game theory and his battle with schizophrenia.
David F Gruber, is an oceanographer and science journalist. In January 2006, his first book, Aglow in the Dark, was published by Harvard University Press. The book, co-written with Vincent Pieribone, a medical professor at Yale University, traces the discovery of bioluminescence and fluorescent proteins and their impact on biology.
MANIFOLD DESTINY
A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it.
by SYLVIA NASAR AND DAVID GRUBER
Issue of 2006-08-28
Posted 2006-08-21
The new issue of The New Yorker, in its annals of mathematics, has published Manifold Destiny, an article on the fascinating story of mathematic's struggle to prove the Poincaire conjecture, a century old mathematical puzzle, the solution that has finally been credited to Dr Grigory Perelman, of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, Russia, for which he was to recieve this years Fields medal, that he turned down. The story is intriguing, because Perelman is a reclusive mathematician, working alone, who published the proof online and not in a peer reviewed journal. The way the proof appeared suddenly, after years of indifferent contact with Perelman and the mathematical fraternity, took them all by surprise. Many now recognize that the Poincaire conjecture is close to being solved, and efforts to explicate Perelman's proof are being undertaken by groups of mathematicians.
Mathematics is probably the only branch of science in which rigorous application of proof is so central to establishing the validity of a theorem or conjecture, it is that definite. It is either there or not there. In other branches, the process is less structured allowing for a scope of further investigation. Thus, the proof of a long standing mathematical conjecture like the Poincaire, that has long baffled many, becomes an indicator of scientific purity and mathematical prowess; of bragging rights. Such a definite solution also leaves many who have spent years trying to prove the Poincaire conjecture with less to do, with many tieing up loose ends, or now looking for the next big puzzle to solve. For the many who have contributed to the understanding of the Poincaire, at last count, it had led to three Fields medal, is their place in scientific history. A history we will see as we read A Manifold Destiny depends on who is writing that history, a scientific Rashomon.
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