Talk:Solution of the Poincaré conjecture

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Alright. Please find a mathematician who is willing to bring sense into this mess. I'm not going to. There is a lot of good information in the other articles, maybe delete this one. Believe me, whoever is responsible for this article: almost everything is incorrect, find someone who knows this stuff. I don't have time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.19.111.154 (talk) 20:50, 10 September 2007 (UTC)


The illustration in "What is a 3-dimensional Sphere" is very misguiding. I won't edit as I don't have an account. The whole point in this paragraph is: the 3-dim. sphere is one dimension more than what we usually call sphere. Then this picture comes with a map of the world as an example of 2-dim, and continues to call the 2-sphere 3-sphere, confusing everyone for whom this paragraph is intended. Delete it please.

  1. UPDATE# edited it. but it goes on like that. Whoever mad these illustration did not understand the 3-sphere at all. Please change it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.19.111.154 (talk) 20:41, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

The explanation of "Compact" doesn't seem quite right. In a metric space, it's "closed + bounded", but the definition given appears to give bounded twice and not closed: "A compact manifold is bounded and does not extend to infinity.".

I'm not sure of the best way to explain "closed" in layman's terms either, though.

Rupertsw 14:26, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

"closed" Maybe: if you move through the manifold, or what we would call in the 2-dim case "on it", you never need to stop or change your direction abuptly, i.e. there is no boundary.

Contents

[edit] And...

the images?--kiddo 22:06, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, what happened to all the images I uploaded? They were graphics I made myself and were free for common use. Now the only images left were made by someone else.

The images were deleted because you didn't specify which license you want your pictures to fall under. When uploading a picture, you should label it with one of the Wikipedia:Image copyright tags.
Now, you don't have to go through the whole process again. If you tell me what license you want to use (look in the "For image creators" section for some possibilities), I can retrieve your images and do the tagging for you. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 03:14, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Definition of manifold is not well-explained

The definition given of a manifold uses the unnecessarily technical term charts -- but then goes ahead and gives a wrong example (the 2-sphere built from two disks glued only at their boundaries) to supposedly illustrate this concept. Nowhere is the essential concept of "locally Euclidean" either mentioned or implied.Daqu (talk) 20:51, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inappropriate attribution of solution to Hamilton

If two mathematicians jointly or independently solve a problem, that is when it is appropriate to attribute both their names to the solution(s). But unless this be the case, mathematicians do not list as solvers all historical contributors to the mathematics used in the solution. As is well-known, Hamilton did develop mathematical ideas that were later used by Perelman to solve the problem. But Hamilton did not solve the problem.

Especially since Hamilton wasn't even willing to meet with Perelman to discuss the latter's ideas that led to the solution of the Poincaré conjecture, it would be a particularly cruel miscarriage of fairness to attribute the proof to Hamilton. (No one would deny that Perelman's proof makes crucial use of mathematics developed by Hamilton about two decades earlier. It also makes crucial use of ideas developed by Riemann and Poincaré and many other mathematicians as well.)Daqu (talk) 21:07, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

What are you referring to specifically? If you're referring to the title "Hamilton-Perelman solution....", it's because the title is not only giving attribution to the person who completed the proof of Poincare. That's not the point of the title. The point is to explain the proof, and the macroscopic aspects of the proof, the "big picture" is largely due to Hamilton. If you don't mention his name you would be misleading the audience into thinking Perelman devised the Ricci flow approach all on his own. It's not the job of the page title to give a full and complete attribution to who solved the problem. The point is the big picture. The complete attribution you look for inside the article. Rybu (talk) 23:53, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] annoying ignorant layman stickler for detail

Unless I am told otherwise, I will think a manifold is a space, and a space is not necessarily a manifold. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.170.68.234 (talk) 16:13, 16 April 2008 (UTC)