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Poincare's Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math's Greatest Puzzles
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In the tradition of Fermat's Enigma and Prime Obsession, George Szpiro brings to life the giants of mathematics who struggled to prove a theorem for a century and the mysterious man from St. Petersburg, Grigory Perelman, who fi nally accomplished the impossible. In 1904 Henri Poincaré developed the Poincaré Conjecture, an attempt to understand higher-dimensional space and possibly the shape of the universe. The problem was he couldn't prove it. A century later it was named a Millennium Prize problem, one of the seven hardest problems we can imagine. Now this holy grail of mathematics has been found.
Accessibly interweaving history and math, Szpiro captures the passion, frustration, and excitement of the hunt, and provides a fascinating portrait of a contemporary noble-genius.
Anonymous
Posted April 7, 2012
A nice bit of popular science writing here. Lots of interesting
background into the lives of mathmaticians and the drama
of how they hunted for the solution to Poincares Conjecture.
Even though its a popular science book and Szpiro doesn't
inflict equations on you, there are parts where your brain is
gonna heat up trying to follow along, but its an arcane area
of math and Szpiro works hard to make it understandable
for the interested layman.
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Overview
The amazing story of one of the greatest math problems of all time and the reclusive genius who solved itIn the tradition of Fermat's Enigma and Prime Obsession, George Szpiro brings to life the giants of mathematics who struggled to prove a theorem for a century and the mysterious man from St. Petersburg, Grigory Perelman, who fi nally accomplished the impossible. In 1904 Henri Poincaré developed the Poincaré Conjecture, an attempt to understand higher-dimensional space and possibly the shape of the universe. The problem was he couldn't prove it. A century later it was named a Millennium Prize problem, one of the seven hardest problems we can imagine. ...