Russian May Have Solved Poincare Conjecture

nev4 writes "Reuters (via Yahoo News) reports that Grigori Perelman from St. Petersburg, Russia appears to have solved the Poincare Conjecture. The Poincare Conjecture is one of the 7 Millenium Problems (another is P vs NP, also covered on /. recently). Solving a Millenium Problem carries a reward of $1M, but apparently Perelman isn't interested..." nerdb0t provides some background in the form of this MathWorld page from 2003.

Comments

Riemann hypothesis reportadly also solved

[jm91509]

According to the Guardian another clever Maths dude has proposed a solution to another of the 7 "million dollar" problems.

This particular problem has big implications for online cryptography as it deals with the distribution of prime numbers. Apparantly.

(I'm no mathematics person BTW.)

Re:He'd post AC

[Waffle Iron]

Apparently the guy is able to find enough time to work on these problems. That kind of freedom is what money buys.

It probably would only take $15K in the US to rent a small apartment in a cheap city and buy food for a year, allowing him to work on his problems. I think the point is that this guy may have been able to make a significant contribution to human knowledge and maybe centuries of notoriety with what it cost to live for a few years. Most of the rest of us would have taken the same amount of money and just dumped it into buying an upscale SUV.

Re:He'd post AC

[tlord]

Actually, the title:

"On the electrodynamics of moving bodies"

is exceedingly boastful.

In computer science, an analogy might be to publish a paper titled:

"On datastructures, in general"

What an oddly broad topic to choose, unless
you are claiming to be saying something
rather profound.

Perelman and the prize

[NimNar]

Perelman was unemployed for 10 years while he worked on the problem. His last job was in the States in the early 90s, where he saved enough money to live in Russia for the whole time he worked.

So think about his perspective: he's a complete loner who was ignored by the mathematical community for 10 years! Now that he's going to be a "certified" genius (with the $1M prize) why exactly should he care.

Also, it's worth pointing out that like Wiles (who solved the Fermat Conjecture), Perelman's work develops a theory that has the Poincare conjecture as a corollary which is interesting but not of central importance.

Re:Perelman and the prize

[doublegauss]

Perelman was unemployed for 10 years while he worked on the problem. His last job was in the States in the early 90s, where he saved enough money to live in Russia for the whole time he worked.

What I find particularly interesting is that this guy was able to devote 10 years of his life to solving a problem so complex that there was no intermediate output. The same happened to Wiles, who took 7 years to get hold properly of the Fermat theorem.

Obviously, in both cases it would have been impossible to reach such great results if the authors had had to keep a steady pace of lesser publications. But this is the rule in the academic world: "publish or perish". You must prove yourself "productive" year by year, otherwise you're out.

I've always thought that applying industrial methods of prouctivity measurement to research is utter madness (I am an academic myself). IMO, Perelman's and Wiles' cases show it clearly.

Time

[r2q2]

The main problem with all of these solutions especially in math is that time is the largest factor in determining if the solution is correct. Give you 2 years and its marginally okay. Give you 40 and its accepted as a standard etc...

Re:Hopefully he has better luck than de Branges

[agentpi]

I go to Purdue, and de Branges is unable to explain himself at all. He has attempted to explain his process to other professors at a seminar here, and has only confused them. He also kicked first year grad students out of his seminar, stating they were to inexperienced. From these grad students, I have learned that he is pretty much and hotshot and an asshole. I'm thinking about going to his seminar on wednesday just to see how long it takes him to kick me out. (I'm a first year undergraduate). A note about his proof of the Bieberbach Conjecture. While de Branges did prove the conjecture, he overcomplicated it, as he does many things, and everybody and their thesis advisor has simplified his proof in some way. Mathworld really discredits his "proof" for one, it contains no proof, and his method was proven flawed by counterexample in 1998.

Re:He'd post AC

[johnnyb]

I think what he was saying was that the ONLY way money comes into circulation is through loans. Therefore, although some can pay back there loans, it is physically impossible for the entire country to ever pay back their loans, because not only are we responsible to pay back the loans, but we also have to pay back interest! But the banks only created enough money for the _principle_ of the loan, not for the interest. So, while you and me can pay back our individual loans, it is physically impossible for the whole country to pay off its debt, because the money supply would be gone, and there would be nothing left to pay with.

Let's say that there is a small economy. I am a central bank. Right now, there is no money. Therefore, you take a loan out for $10, and I charge $1 interest. Frank takes out a loan for $10, and I charge him $1 interest. The whole economy has $20 in it, but they owe $22. There's no way this can be paid off. Now, one of you could handle their money better than the other, and get a $1 advantage to pay off their loan, but that would leave only $9 in the economy to pay off a remaining $11 loan. One of you would be fine, but there is no way in this system for everyone to pay back their debts. So, eventually, the banks own nearly everything.

This is why the founders of our country hated central banks, and was one of the primary reasons for the revolutionary war.