Poincare

RantWoman has been hearing about Grigori Perelman, the Russian mathematician, who, according to new reports has proven the Poincare conjecture. RantWoman is tempted to say eccentric Russian mathematician except that in RantWoman's experience, the phrase "eccentric mathematician" is more likely to be redundant than if eccentric were applied to other professionals. But back to the math.

First, why Mr. Poincare and Mr. Perelman are taking up almost as much news space as Obamacare, the Taliban, narco violence, and Sandra Bullock's cheating mate: http://www.claymath.org/poincare/index.html To wit, the Clay Math institute wants to award Mr. Perelman (for all RantWoman knows, he is probably Dr. Perelman, but bear with us.) a million dollar prize for proving the Poincare conjecture or more precisely for being the first to solve one of the Millennium problems..

Here, for anyone like RantWoman who has a lot of idle brain time on his or her hands and limited easy ways to feed her brain anything else while being freighted around by Metro, is a concise statement of the Poincare conjecture:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PoincareConjecture.html

By concise, RantWoman does not mean entirely comprehensible. RantWoman has been near enough mathematics study to recognize many terms though not to dispute any of what is written. RantWoman considers it sufficient for her purposes that the article referenced above uses words rather than symbols so that Mr. JAWS reads just fine, thank you, without RantWoman having to add home customer support about mathematical symbols to her to-do list just for pleasure reading.

Some other links RantWoman means to digest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_of_the_Poincar%C3%A9_conjecture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_conjecture

RantWoman somewhat apologizes about using the word eccentric. Apparently Dr. Perelman does not want to be on display like some kind of freak and is turning down the prized. As far as RantWoman is concerned, Dr. Perelman gets to make his own decisions about the prize; RantWoman is just fascinated and intrigued by the whole discovery and expects to have things to fill her brain for a good while!