Maths Puzzle 'almost solved'Leigh Dayton
Australian, Australia
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Russian mathematician Grisha Perelman is on the verge of collecting $US1 million ($1.35 million) for solving one of the seven greatest mathematical problems of all time, the Poincare Conjecture.
"The word is he's got it," said mathematician Thomas Hales of the University of Pittsburgh. "But no one wants to say so in case they're wrong," he told The Australian yesterday at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St Louis, Missouri.
The Poincare Conjecture is about the "mathematics of smooth behaviour", said Keith Devlin, a mathematician at Stanford University in California and author of the 2002 book The Millennium Problems:
the seven greatest unsolved mathematical puzzles of all time. According to Professor Devlin, the conjecture proposes a way to tell if a bizarre-looking object is an ordinary three-dimensional object in disguise.
The Millennium Prizes were established in 2002 by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a challenge to mathematicians.
feb 20, 2006
Australian, Australia
______________
Russian mathematician Grisha Perelman is on the verge of collecting $US1 million ($1.35 million) for solving one of the seven greatest mathematical problems of all time, the Poincare Conjecture.
"The word is he's got it," said mathematician Thomas Hales of the University of Pittsburgh. "But no one wants to say so in case they're wrong," he told The Australian yesterday at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St Louis, Missouri.
The Poincare Conjecture is about the "mathematics of smooth behaviour", said Keith Devlin, a mathematician at Stanford University in California and author of the 2002 book The Millennium Problems:
the seven greatest unsolved mathematical puzzles of all time. According to Professor Devlin, the conjecture proposes a way to tell if a bizarre-looking object is an ordinary three-dimensional object in disguise.
The Millennium Prizes were established in 2002 by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a challenge to mathematicians.
feb 20, 2006
