Millennium Prize Awarded For Perelman's Poincaré Proof

epee1221 writes "The Clay Mathematics Institute has announced its acceptance of Dr. Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture and awarded the first Millennium Prize. Poincaré questioned whether there exists a method for determining whether a three-dimensional manifold is a spherical: is there a 3-manifold not homologous to the 3-sphere in which any loop can be gradually shrunk to a single point? The Poincaré conjecture is that there is no such 3-manifold, i.e. any boundless 3-manifold in which the condition holds is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. A sketch of the proof using language intended for the lay reader is available at Wikipedia."

Comments

Layman's terms?

[Wizard Drongo]

Fuck layman's terms, do you speak English??!

Re:English Please

[Kjella]

i'll read the wiki page too, but i'm hoping someone here will take a crack at explaining in it plain English.

Some math doohickey is similar to some other math doohickey. Seriously, how much more "in plain English" than the linked wiki can you get without losing the point of trying? The only thing you end up with are misunderstandings like the other guy modded up replying to your post saying "As for implications, as far as I can see, it just tells us that lots of things can be deformed into spheres" even though the 3-sphere has about as little to with regular spheres as a sphere has to do with circles.

I would now like him to demonstrate...

[EWAdams]

... how much wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

The results would be about equally valuable.