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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.'"
Homeomorphic. Thank god, they dumb it down a bit later:
More colloquially, it's homotopy-equivalent to the n-sphere! Of course!
Slow news day?
This is one of the Millennium Prize problems! One down, seven more to go!
I thought the general consesus was that Perelman had proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture. If this proof by Zhu Xiping and Cao Huaidong is correct it must be a rephrasing of Perelman's work. Perelman is credited with making the major theoretical advances in order for any such proof. Basically he did most of the heavy lifting while these Chinese mathematicians basically dotted the i's and crossed the t's.
The proof is 300 pages but I would guess the majority of it is an overview of Perelman's extension of Hamiltion's Ricci Flow.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I think it basically has something to do with:
If poincare conjecture = proved , my homepage switches to harsh new look. QED.
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init 11 - for when you need that edge.
This is another reason why math isn't dead. The world's problems aren't solved, and they aren't impossible, either.
I was just having a conversation about this yesterday with my math teacher.
Lots of people think that high level math is just advanced adding and subtracting.
This is good stuff. Props to Zhu Xiping and Cao Huaidong- this shows people that a career in studying mathematics is actually an interesting and rewarding career.
-- If unsure, say "Why?"
In topology spheres are identical to cubes and pyramids. However spheres are not identical to doughnuts. What PC says is that spheres are the only class of objects that are not doughnut-like (has holes). This seems trivial and obvious to most of us however to prove it is really hard. What it shows is that there is something fundamental and important about the sphere-like class of objects. It also says something important about space itself.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
This leads us to the answer to another pressing problem in mathematics - Why Do We Care?
Really, what does this have to do with how we deal with reality? Will we be buying amazing products that are based on this? Breaking encryption? Making pigs fly?
In the the 18th and 19th century, the foundations were laid for something called finite fields, which had little to no impact on reality then. Fast forward to 1960, when a couple of guys figured out a way to use finite fields in a way that enables you to still play a scratched cd, or ensuring your raid-5 is working properly when a disk fails.
So do you still think the mathematicians back in the 18th and 19th century should have done something else, something with direct applications in their time?
Seems like whats been proven is that a doughnut != sphere.
A topologist is someone who doesn't know whether to dip their doughnut into their coffee mug, or vice versa...
The problem is rather that the complexity of current math problems has approached the limit of what humans are able to handle. Any 8th grader can verify Pythagoras, but verifying a proof like the one at hand can only be done by a handful of the world's best mathematicians and may take weeks to complete (remember what happened when Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem). A proof is meant to demonstrate that a given conjecture is true by splitting it up into many small steps which are considered self-evident. However, today even verifying a proof is very hard and the time may be near when no one on earth will be able to handle the complexity of this task anymore, so that even if a proof is given it may be impossible to say with certainty whether it is valid. Computers may help here, but other problems arise in that context.
First, think in Four Dimensions. Not in terms of time, or something, but as a fourth spacial dimension - like in terms of up down, left right, in out, and foo bar. A 3 sphere is a sphere in that sort of space. For example, in three dimensions, a 2-sphere is just a normal sphere - a group of points that are all the same distance from a certain centre point. A 3-sphere in 4 dimensions is just the set of points in four dimensional space that are the same 'distance' from a point in 4D. (We define distance using the pythagorus formula sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2 + k^2).)
A 3-manifold is another four dimensional object - in fact, a class of objects. They are the analogies of surfaces in 3D space, only again we have it in 4D space. The 3-sphere, for example is an example of a 3-manifold. Simple, connected and closed are two topological properties describing what a surface is like. In layman's terms, simple connected and close means that the surface is well... just an obvious surface. The simple-connected-closed-3-manifold taken together essentially rule out the bizzare sorts of objects that mathematicians come up with. There won't be any 'holes' in the object, and there won't be any non-solid boundaries, the object can't go through itself, and you can't take two seperate objects and pretend the pair is a single one.
So what does the conjecture say? It says that if we have any 3-manifold satisfying certain properties, there is way of distorting it (that's basically what homeomorphism means. Like you take the object as a piece of putty and stretch and pull it, or fold it, or whatever without cutting or gluing bits together) to make it into a 3-sphere.
It's a sort of bubblegum theorem. You can chew up the manifold and blow it into a bubble. (Okay, it's not really like that, topologists.... But it's close enough)
I assert that there is a torrent of the proof somewhere on the net. Now can someone prove that, please?
I'll accept the proof when it's been properly reviewed by peers. Just publishing a proof in a journal doesn't equate to a correct proof, now does it?
"isn't that like the Da Vinci Code???"
I think it makes a good thriller title... "The Poincare Conjecture"
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The purpose of a proof is to communicate a sequence of statements such that each and every individual step is easily derivable from axioms or well-known theorems. Let me emphasize this again: a proof is about communication, not merely about making true statements.
Perelman apparently failed to do this: he may have produced a sequence of true statements that could somehow form a subsequence of a complete proof, but he has apparently not supplied enough detail to demonstrate his point to even specialists in his area. The fact that he may have done "the heavy lifting" or that he may have provided the key ideas doesn't change that.
I think it is valid to give all three mathematicians equal credit. And, strictly speaking, the people who actually have done the proof are the ones who "dotted the i's" because that's what ultimately constitutes a proof.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
As someone who has lived in China for a long time and was formerly a mathematician, I think that your statement is sort of ridiculous. For one thing, as others have pointed out, saying "some race is good at math" as if being good at math were something in your blood is silly. Having said that, the Chinese (as in, those from China) are, unfortunately, overwelmingly bad at Math. In ancient times the Chinese innovated quite competitively but this hasn't been true for a long time. Since I just took issue with your equating mathematical ability with racial characteristics, you can probably guess that there's another reason, and as it happens, I am prepared to qualify my statements.
The Chinese school system (and in ancient times, the scholar system, which stratified society into a "scholar class" and the "masses") is completely and utterly innovation stifling. It emphasises testing and memorization above all else, and curiosity and individuality are systematically beaten out of students. No snide comments about communism, please, it has nothing to do with that (any mathematician will tell you that the Soviet Union produced a metric tonne of talented mathematicians, my advisor was one). Chinese students memorize everything. Because I speak Chinese and love math, I have tutored quite a number of high school and university undergraduate students in math and the simple reason that they suck at it is they basically cannot wrap their head around proofs.
Proofs are difficult for most people at first, but you have to understand that the way a typical mainland Chinese kid approaches math is by memorizing every formula in his math textbook and then trying as best he can to choose the one that "works" with the problem he is presented. He does not do this because he stupid: he does this because the Chinese standardized testing system reinforces the behaviour. The exam problems are expressly designed so that various formulas are the "keys" to the problem, that is, answering the (usually multiple choice) question correctly relies on your ability to quickly recall one formula (perhaps two) and plug the numbers in effectively. So many problems are presented and so little time is given that no time for derivation or logic is really provided. Because of this, essentially every Chinese kid can recite from memory a whole host of trigonometric identities without having the faintest idea why they work or how to derive them, even when the derivation is relatively simple.
Because there's so much anti-Chinese sentiment in the west these days and on Slashdot in particular, I want to reiterate for a moment and say that this is not an inherent failure in the Chinese kids themselves -- they are not stupid -- but they are completely crippled by their education system. From day one they memorize everything. They memorize entire passages written in old Chinese and are asked to reproduced them from memory at exam time -- I've been told by several kids here in Beijing that writing even one character wrong is essentially equivalent to forfeiting the entire problem. These are not 3 line passages folks: we're talking two or three pages of old Chinese. Imagine being told at 17 to memorize 3 pages of Beowulf. That's what we're talking about.
The thing is (as any drama major will tell you) memorization, like all things, gets easier with practice. And from day one (when I first arrived in China I moonlighted as a Kindergarten teacher, so I have some first hand experience here) kids are memorizing stuff, from poems to proverbs to Chinese characters. It becomes easy for them, and over the years they depend on it more and more. The worst part is, high school and lower division level mathematics (if it can be called that) presents problems (like doing integrals or calculating derivatives) that lend themselves well to the "memorize a formula" method. And so Chinese kids tend to do exceptionally well in these courses, and then mistakenly assume they are good at math. This is in fact not