Chinese Mathematicians Prove Poincare Conjecture

Joe Lau writes to mention a story running on the Xinhua News Agency site, reporting a proof for the Poincare Conjecture in an upcoming edition of the Asian Journal of Mathematics. From the article: "A Columbia professor Richard Hamilton and a Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman have laid foundation on the latest endeavors made by the two Chinese. Prof. Hamilton completed the majority of the program and the geometrization conjecture. Yang, member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in an interview with Xinhua, 'All the American, Russian and Chinese mathematicians have made indispensable contribution to the complete proof.'"

Comments

It's all a conjecture

[The Bungi]

I looked at TFA, and I was kind of lost after reading this:

In its original form, the Poincaré conjecture states that every simply connected closed three-manifold is homeomorphic to the three-sphere (in a topologist's sense) S^3, where a three-sphere is simply a generalization of the usual sphere to one dimension higher.

Homeomorphic. Thank god, they dumb it down a bit later:

More colloquially, the conjecture says that the three-sphere is the only type of bounded three-dimensional space possible that contains no holes. This conjecture was first proposed in 1904 by H. Poincaré Eric Weisstein's World of Biography (Poincaré 1953, pp. 486 and 498), and subsequently generalized to the conjecture that every compact n-manifold is homotopy-equivalent to the n-sphere if it is homeomorphic to the n-sphere. The generalized statement reduces to the original conjecture for n==3.

More colloquially, it's homotopy-equivalent to the n-sphere! Of course!

Slow news day?

Re:This is...

[nacturation]

One down, seven more to go!

Given that there are seven questions total, maybe you know the mystery surrounding the elusive eighth question: "What is seven minus one?"