Two of our colloquia this semester were concerned with work very much in the public eye this year. The first was from Francis Bonahan of the Mathematics Department here at USC.
He talked about the work that won the Fields medal – the proof, by Grigori Perelman, of the Poincaré conjecture. Or better, I should say the work toward the proof, since the citation does not explicitly mention the conjecture, but his larger body of work. (MathWorld link, Wikipedia link.) In fact, Francis spoke about a lot more than just the Poincaré conjecture. He talked about the larger setting in which that work fits, something mathematicians call the “geometrization conjectureâ€, which Mathematicians care a lot more about. Perelman’s work does more than just prove the Poincaré, it addresses the whole (3-)ball of wax, so to speak. He told us quite a bit about that in the talk, spending most time talking about what they were and how they fit into the scheme of things, rather than […] Click to continue reading this post →
