![]() These are known as the Pythagorean Triples, like (3,4,5) and (5,12,13). ![]() There are many trios of integers (x,y,z) that satisfy x²+y²=z². The most challenging of these has become known as Fermat’s Last Theorem. He made claims without proving them, leaving them to be proven by other mathematicians decades, or even centuries, later. Math was apparently more of a hobby for Fermat, and so one of history’s greatest math minds communicated many of his theorems through casual correspondence. Pierre de Fermat was a 17th-century French lawyer and mathematician. He said his work was for the benefit of mathematics, not personal gain, and also that Hamilton, who laid the foundations for his proof, was at least as deserving of the prizes. Perelman was offered the million-dollar Millennium Prize, as well as the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of Math. It was groundbreaking, yet modest.Īfter the math world spent a few years verifying the details of Perelman’s work, the awards began. Perelman’s proof had some small gaps, and drew directly from research by American mathematician Richard Hamilton. After some revisions and developments, the conjecture took the form of “Every simply-connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to S^3,” which essentially says “the simplest 4D shape is the 4D equivalent of a sphere.”Ī century later, in 2003, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman posted a proof of Poincaré’s conjecture on the modern open math forum arXiv. Poincaré then went up to 4-dimensional stuff, and asked an equivalent question. ![]() In some significant sense, a ball is the simplest of these shapes. For shapes in 3D space, like a ball or a donut, it wasn’t very hard to classify them all. Here’s the idea: Topologists want mathematical tools for distinguishing abstract shapes. Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician who, around the turn of the 20th century, did foundational work in what we now call topology. Today, they’re all still unsolved, except for the Poincaré conjecture. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute, a non-profit dedicated to “increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge,” asked the world to solve seven math problems and offered $1,000,000 to anybody who could crack even one.
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