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

Re:It's all a conjecture

[Barraketh]

Technically, it's more like proving P != NP, since that's the current accepted belief. Proving P=NP would be huge - this would give polynomial time algorithms for Travelling Salesman Problem, Boolean Satisiability Problem, and a slew of others (that all reduce to each other in polynomial time). Proving P != NP pretty much confirms what everyone believes to be true, similar to how the Poincaire conjecture was generally accepted to be true. Still, this is a major result, and clearly falls under the "News for nerds, stuff that matters" heading.