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August 15, 2006
"You Don't See What You're Seeing Until You See It"
A story in the International Herald Tribune today claims some people proved an expansive century-old math problem revolving around the nature of space.
It's called the Poincaré conjecture. [IHT explains it this way: "If any loop in a certain kind of three-dimensional space can be shrunk to a point without ripping or tearing either the loop or the space, the space is equivalent to a sphere."]
A guy named Grisha Perelman apparently published some stuff on the Internet in 2002 to get people on the trail to prove this, but then he disappeared into the Russian woods.
Now that everyone else has caught up, math bigwigs wonder if Perelman will come out of the woodwork to claim a bunch of prizes. Even though he's already turned down zillions of other kinds of recognition. Including cash!!!
Interviewed in the story was a guy named William Thurston of Cornell University. Lending his insight on how humans arrive at solutions to perplexing questions, he said: "You don't see what you're seeing until you see it. But when you do see it, it lets you see many other things."
Full story: Elusive proof, elusive prover: A new math mystery"
Posted by Dipika at August 15, 2006 6:04 PM
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