Science's Breakthrough of the Year 92
johkir writes "Last year, evolution was the breakthrough of the year; We found it full of new developments in understanding how new species originate. But we did get a complaint or two that perhaps we were just paying extra attention to the lively political/religious debate that was taking place over the issue, particularly in the United States.
Perish the thought! Our readers can relax this year: Religion and politics are off the table, and n-dimensional geometry is on instead. This year's Breakthrough salutes the work of a lone, publicity-shy Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman, who was at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences until 2005. The work is very technical but has received unusual public attention because Perelman appears to have proven the Poincaré Conjecture (Our coverage from earlier this year), a problem in topology whose solution will earn a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. That's only if Perelman survives what's left of a 2-year gauntlet of critical attack required by the Clay rules, but most mathematicians think he will.
There is also a page of runner-ups. Many of which have been covered here on Slashdot."
Update please (Score:1)
I hope he isn't living in poverty when things are available to him, but if he is who do I speak to about claiming the unclaimed prize?
Re:Update please (Score:4, Informative)
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Religion and politics off the table? I think not. (Score:5, Funny)
I've got karma to burn, so let's use some up.
You stop right there, mister.
I don't care what kind of "proof" this seedy Perelman character says he has. In Leviticus, The Bible makes it clear that in a closed 3-mainfold, there non-spherical loops that can be continually tightened to a point. Who are you going to believe, Grigori Perelman, or God? If you even try to put this proof in my kid's math book, I'm going to demand more stickers! Slashdot obviously wants the terrorists to win!
Apologies to any real mathematicians out there, that was the best twisting of Poincaré Conjecture I could come up for the sake of this joke based on Wikipedia's article. And while I hope that while everyone realizes that I'm kidding, I also hope that some folks realize that I'm kinda not. The vast majority of people who insist that such things as evolution aren't true sound to me pretty much like I just did, because the vast majority of people who I argue with over the subject start from the premise, "It says in Genesis..."
Re:Religion and politics off the table? I think no (Score:2)
the vast majority of people who I argue with over the subject start from the premise, "It says in Genesis..."
I think I'm going to start my own replies to this sort of argument with this reply: Is this from the same Bible which is missing a whole book? Not just a testament, like Luke, but a whole book. After all, unless you're a Roman Catholic, you very likely do not have a bible which has the Apocrypha in it. And if your Bible is missing that entire book, how can you be sure of what is actually said in so much as a single chapter and verse?
Not that I expect to ever win such an argument, but it makes for some fun
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Well, I'm really pushing the karma, so I swear, I'll leave this thread completely alone after this, and feel free to mod it down if you want. (My preferred mod tag is "Off-Topic," because that's what this post is, as it's pretty much solely intended for its parent post. I'm not trolling, so get it right.)
Before I get into any sort of argument about evolution these days, I ask a pretty simple question that will determine whether or not it's worthwhile to go any further: Is there anything whatsoever, any
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Is there anything whatsoever, any evidence in any scientific field, that, if discovered, could possibly convince you that that the story of creation in Genesis is not the literal truth?
It's no surprise that going any further is pointless after this question, because you have essentially just segregated them into two groups: those who's belief is based on faith, and those who's belief is based on rationality... and a rational argument means nothing to a Faithy (and vice versa, of course).
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Heh, only the majority of all Christians use it, as Catholics and Orthodox comprise the majority of Christians in the world.
http://www.adherents.com/adh_rb.html#International [adherents.com]
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that, and there's only four corners of the world [wikipedia.org]. Irenaeus argued that there should only be four gospels as those ones were good, but also because there are four corners of the world, four winds, animals have four legs, etc. The choice was really quite arbitary.
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Personally, I though GP was being sarcastic, but you do have a very serious point about religion.
If one were to take religion seriously, you must really consider the problem of the nature of Holy Books and man's interaction with them.
Unless you believe much like Kings of the Medieval era that if god didn't want you to do something he wouldn't have made you king.
As in... If god
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Perhaps you haven't been paying attention. Religion has always been a political tool. It's a convenient mechanism used to control people, and has worked beautifully for thousands of years. If you need an example, see the current U.S.A.
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Personally, I though GP was being sarcastic, but you do have a very serious point about religion.
He doesn't actually. It is a huge jump to go from "there's a book missing" (which is entirely possible) to "every single chapter and verse is in doubt" which is nonsense given that we have thousands of copies of those chapters and verses, some of them dated to the early 2nd centur
OT:Religion and politics off the table? I think no (Score:2)
Every religion define their own truth. If it's not there, it's because it's not meant to be there. In a way, Christianity is very loosely defined because Jesus never made writings so anything authentic about his words or actions is fair game. You could actually invert that statment and say "Is this from the same Bible that included a whole false book?".
In contrast, you have the Qur'an, which there is exactly one definitie version of, written down at
Re:OT:Religion and politics off the table? I think (Score:2)
It's not quite that simple. Caliph Uthman sponsored an official text and tried to destroy all variants in the 650s (about 20 years after Muhammad died), but in the 10th century some Islamic scholars were imprisoned for refusing to abandon their preferred variants, and even in the mid 20th century there was a variant still being used in North Africa.
?! I'm puzzled as to w
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That said, you need to distinguish between "the Apocrypha", which the RCC holds to be a second canon, and various other apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books.
Re:Religion and politics off the table? I think no (Score:2)
Clear? As in the Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or 15th century English version of Leviticus?
And are these African or European non-spherical loops?
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Re:Religion and politics off the table? I think no (Score:2)
Re:Religion and politics off the table? I think no (Score:1)
But it doesn't.
It does mention a little something about the first humans, though.
The Origin of Species... (Score:5, Funny)
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The universe is an odd place and I wouldn't be surprised if the supreme being (if (s)he exists) put all those fossils there just before they where dugg up, would be great fun to watch all the theories sprout up.
I like the idea of a world carried by 4 elephants on the back of a star tu
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Some people/groups/societies are just a tad slower than others.
Unfortunately, it seems advantageous (evolutionarily) to be a religious nut. Go forth and multiply.
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Unfortunately, it seems advantageous (evolutionarily) to be a religious nut. Go forth and multiply.
It seems that way right up until the human population goes past the tipping point and there's a huge die-off. Reckless multiplication may have been good for humans in the past, but it's about to start becoming very inconvenient..
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Let me be the first to say it Homer-style (Score:4, Funny)
Crow T. Trollbot
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Yoh?
Its all way over my head (Score:4, Funny)
I am now gagging for an opportunity start making crap up about nonvanishing continuous tangent vectors the next time hairy balls come up in conversation.
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If this is a common topic in your conversational circle, please include me out -
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Give me a kitten.
Invisibility cloak (Score:2)
It's runners-up, not runner-ups. (Score:4, Informative)
-Isaac
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Also, picking on grammar with a snotty tone is a pretty good reason why everyone hates nerds.
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Why do both? Wouldn't you rather be hated than follow his advice?
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-Dan (without whose name one cannot spell "pedantic")
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-Isaac
There's a podcast as well (Score:3, Informative)
Mathematics is NOT Science (Score:1)
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More and more, the path to scientific "discovery" has been led more by mathematical speculation than by experimental observation. As the trend continues, experimental observation is becoming more the tool to verify or invalidate mathematical paradigms than it is to discover new unanswered questions.
The most obvious example is string theory, the debate about which continues as to whether o
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-Blah blah blah blah...blah. BOTTOM LINE, you Slashdot nincompoops...
Well, that wasn't exactly what I had in mind.
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A more appropriate title (Score:1)
Not trying to be picky, but there is a substantial difference between Science and Mathematics (although that might be a surprise to some people, it is true).
Err... not quite (Score:1)
Science and Mathematics are Not the Same (Score:2, Insightful)
There have been some breakthroughs in Mathematics that were simultaneously notable in Science (solving the 4 Colors Problem, for example, the first time a computer was used to experimentally and e
mod parent up (Score:1)
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Science Magazine (Score:1)
Not the entire endeavor of Science.
(Those breakthroughs are noted by the Ig Nobel Prizes.)
Number three (Score:1)
3 SHRINKING ICE
Glaciologists nailed down an unsettling observation this year: The world's two great ice sheets--covering Greenland and Antarctica--are indeed losing ice to the oceans, and losing it at an accelerating pace.
Pereleman isn't accepting for a reason. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060 828fa_fact2 [newyorker.com]
Interesting, but very esoteric... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Interesting, but very esoteric... (Score:3, Funny)
The actual breakthrough of the year was that a Slashdotter got laid back in February, but they couldn't include it in the list because they haven't been able to confirm the details. So this one is a sort of symbolic stand-in.
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huh, by that measure, no mathematical proofs would ever make it to the breakthrough of the year. for that matter, the layman is not a technical expert on genetics, but he is happy to discuss the "media-filtered" version of any result: "eye color is not a genetic trait" is interesting pub-conversation.
for
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Discover Magazine has best 100 science stories (Score:1)
The Article (Score:4, Informative)
TO MATHEMATICIANS, GRIGORI PERELMAN'S proof of the Poincare conjecture qualifies at least as the Breakthrough of the Decade. But it has taken them a good part of that decade to convince themselves that it was for real. In 2006, nearly 4 years after the Russian mathematician released the first of three papers outlining the proof, researchers finally reached a consensus that Perelman had solved one of the subject's most venerable problems. But the solution touched off a storm of controversy and drama that threatened to overshadow the brilliant work.
Perelman's proof has fundamentally altered two distinct branches of mathematics. First, it solved a problem that for more than a century was the indigestible seed at the core of topology, the mathematical study of abstract shape. Most mathematicians expect that the work will lead to a much broader result, a proof of the geometrization conjecture: essentially, a "periodic table" that brings clarity to the study of three-dimensional spaces, much as Mendeleev's table did for chemistry.
While bringing new results to topology, Perelman's work brought new techniques to geometry. It cemented the central role of geometric evolution equations, powerful machinery for transforming hard-to-work-with spaces into more-manageable ones. Earlier studies of such equations always ran into "singularities" at which the equations break down. Perelman dynamited that roadblock.
"This is the first time that mathematicians have been able to understand the structure of singularities and the development of such a complicated system," said Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard University at a lecture in Beijing this summer. "The methods developed ... should shed light on many natural systems, such as the Navier-Stokes equation [of fluid dynamics] and the Einstein equation [of general relativity]."
Unruly spaces
Henri Poincare, who posed his problem in 1904, is generally regarded as the founded of topology, the first mathematician to clearly distinguish it from analysis (the branch of mathematics that evolved from calculus) and geometry. Topology is often described as "rubber-sheet geometry," because it deals with properties of surfaces that can undergo arbitrary amounts of stretching. Tearing and its opposite, sewing, are not allowed.
Our bodies, and most of the familiar objects they interact with, have three dimensions. Their surfaces, however, have only two. As far as topology is concerned, two-dimensional surfaces with no boundary (those that wrap around and close in on themselves, as our skin does) have essentially only one distinguishing feature: the number of holes in the surface. A surface with no holes is a sphere: a surface with one hole is a torus; and so on. A sphere can never be turned into a torus, or vice versa.
Three-dimensional objects with 2D surfaces, however, are just the beginning. For example, it is possible to define curved 3D spaces as boundaries of 4D objects. Human beings can only dimly visualize such spaces, but mathematicians can use symbolic notation to describe them and explore their properties. Poincare developed and ingenious tool called the "fundamental group," for detecting holes, twists, and other feature in spaces of any dimension. He conjectured that a 3D space cannot hide any interesting topology from the fundamental group. That is, a 3D space with a "trivial" fundamental group must be a hypersphere: the boundary of a ball in 4D space.
Although simple to state, Poincare's conjecture proved maddeningly difficult to prove. By the early 1980's, mathematicians had proved analogous statements for spaces of every dimension higher than three - but not for the original one that Poincare had pondered.
To make progress, topologists reached for a tool they had neglected: a way to specify distance. They se
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And a donught with no holes is a danish.
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