As the end of the year approaches many publications are releasing their top 10 lists for the year and Science is no exception. Last year Science named evolution as its top breakthrough of the year, but was accused of pandering to the political/religious debates that were/are raging throughout the world, especially in the United States. This year, Science (open access) named a breakthrough that has no connections to politics or religion: the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture by Russian mathematician Grisha Perelman.
The Poincaré Conjecture was originally proposed by Henri Poincaré in 1904 and deals with the topology of everyday objects, namely what, in topological terms, defines a sphere. The Conjecture remained unsolved for almost 100 years, although not for lack of trying, and in the year 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) named the Poincaré Conjecture as one of its six Millennium Problems. These problems have solutions that have eluded mathematicians for years and carry a US $1,000,000 prize to anyone who solves them (either in a positive or negative manner). As stated in the CMI’s official problem declaration, the Poincaré Conjecture asks
If a compact three-dimensional manifold M3 has the property that every simple closed curve within the manifold can be deformed continuously to a point, does it follow that M3 is homeomorphic to the sphere S3?
And i was just getting ready to submit my solution to the Poincare Conjecture – bummer.
Original post [ars technica]