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Poincaré, Fermi, and prizes
July 31, 2006

There are still a few hours left to attempt to answer a version of the Fermi problem that I posed earlier.

The prize I’m offering is modest, but you are probably too late to claim $1 million from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., which has offered that amount to anyone who can prove the Poincaré conjecture. Russian Grigori Perelman has apparently succeeded.

In an odd twist, he seems to have deliberately foregone the prize money by posting his proof in an online archive and failing to meet the Institute’s requirements to publish in a printed, peer-reviewed journal.

And what is Poincaré conjecture? As the Wall Street Journal puts it, "If a closed 3-dimensional manifold has trivial fundamental group, [it must be] homeomorphic to the 3-sphere."

Does that help? You’ve got to love those mathematicians’ ways with words.

Meanwhile, until midnight EDT you can still attempt a solution to my problem, albeit for a less valuable prize.

Posted by Rick Nelson on July 31, 2006 | Comments (0)