Science's Breakthrough of the Year

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."

Religion and politics off the table? I think not.

[KingSkippus]

Our readers can relax this year: Religion and politics are off the table, and n-dimensional geometry is on instead.

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..."

The Origin of Species...

[Anonymous Coward]

...as I recall was published in 1859. Not only was it not a breakthrough of this year, it was a breakthrough of near 150 years ago. As they say, "What exactly are you smoking, sir?"

Let me be the first to say it Homer-style

[Cr0w T. Trollbot]

"In your face, Shing-Tung Yau!" [newyorker.com]

Crow T. Trollbot

Its all way over my head

[Timesprout]

But I found this on the Wikipedia page

Similarly, the hairy ball theorem of algebraic topology says that "one cannot comb the hair on a ball smooth". This fact is immediately convincing to most people, even though they might not recognize the more formal statement of the theorem, that there is no nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field on the sphere.

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.

Re:The Article

[jklappenbach]

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 a donught with no holes is a danish.

Re: Interesting, but very esoteric...

[Black Parrot]

> This mathematical proof is clearly interesting from a mathematics-proofs-point-of-view. But I'm surprised it's considered the breakthrough of the year.

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.