[Maths-Education] The Poincaré Conjecture proved

[Keith Jones]

Colleagues will be familiar with the Poincaré Conjecture (prove - or 
disprove - that any simply connected topological manifold of dimension 3 is 
homeomorphic to the three-sphere) as, along with the Riemann Hypothesis, 
one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics.

So famous, in fact, that the The Clay Mathematics Institute announced in 
May 2000 (to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the International 
Congress of Mathematicians meeting in August 1900) that the solver of the 
problem would receive a monetary reward of 1 million US dollars.

It looks like a prove has been found. The University of Southampton 
mathematician Martin Dunwoody has a preprint that provides a proof of the 
Poincaré conjecture. You can find the preprint on:
http://www.maths.soton.ac.uk/~mjd/Poin.pdf

I understand that a number of people are working through the proof so that 
there may be a way to go before official announcement and the award of the 
Clay Mathematics Institute prize, but the signs are very promising.

Keith Jones
University of Southampton
Research and Graduate School of Education
Highfield
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
UK

e-mail:   dkj@southampton.ac.uk
tel:       +44 (0)23 8059 2449
fax:       +44 (0)23 8059 3556
web:	   http://www.soton.ac.uk/~crime/

Convenor: Geometry Working Group,
British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~dkj/bsrlmgeom/index.html