The Poincaré Conjecture
In Search of the Shape of the Universe
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The Poincaré Conjecture tells the story behind one of the world’s most confounding mathematical theories. Formulated in 1904 by Henri Poincaré, his Conjecture promised to describe the very shape of the universe, but remained unproved until a huge prize was offered for its solution in 2000. Six years later, an eccentric Russian mathematician had the answer.
Here, Donal O’Shea explains the maths behind the Conjecture and its proof, and illuminates the curious personalities surrounding this perplexing conundrum, along the way taking in a grand sweep of scientific history from the ancient Greeks to Christopher Columbus. This is an enthralling tale of human endeavour, intellectual brilliance and the thrill of discovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman became a minor media celebrity last summer when he refused the prestigious Fields medal, awarded every four years to a mathematician under the age of 40. Perelman had succeeded in solving the Poincar conjecture, named for 19th-century French mathematician Henri Poincar , and which contemporary cosmologists believe has implications for our understanding of the shape of the universe. O'Shea, a professor of mathematics at Mount Holyoke College, begins his account of the long and contentious search for a solution to the puzzle by looking at how we came to understand the shape of the Earth, beginning with the Greeks, in particular Pythagoras and Plato. Writing for generalist science buffs, O'Shea gives a brief course in geometry and in topology and the topological structures called manifolds that are the basis of Poincar 's puzzle. Inexplicably, however, O'Shea doesn't give readers a formal statement of the conjecture itself until well into the book. O'Shea describes mind-bending structures in topology as clearly as most of us can describe a cube, but readers will need to do a little Wikipedia-ing first to find out just what it is they're reading about. Illus.
