Poincare conjecture may be solved.

This is big math news! Excerpt from today's SF Gate story below:

Publicity-shy Russian may have solved great math mystery

A publicity-shy Russian researcher who labors in near-seclusion may have solved one of mathematics' oldest and most abstruse problems, the Poincare Conjecture.

Evidence has been mounting since November 2002 that Grigori "Grisha" Perelman has cracked the 100-year-old problem, which seeks to explain the geometry of three-dimensional space.

If Perelman succeeded, he could be eligible for a $1 million prize offered by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Clay Mathematics Institute, formed to identify the world's seven toughest math problems.

Mathematicians around the world have been checking Perelman's work in search of the kind of flaws that have sunk the many other supposed solutions to a problem first presented by the French mathematician Henri Poincare in 1904.

"This is arguably the most famous unsolved problem in math and has been for some time," said Bruce Kleiner, a University of Michigan math professor reviewing Perelman's work.

Perelman's work has advanced the furthest without falling apart, and there is optimism that it will ultimately hold up.

"I don't think there's been a single example of a proof that has gotten this much attention and has withstood the scrutiny as it has so far," Kleiner said.

Not since Princeton University researcher Andrew Wiles cracked the 350-year-old Fermat's Last Theorem a decade ago has the math world been so consumed with one problem.

Comments

[Bob]

what is this problem about

[a]

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Appreciate it!