Entries from Jascha Hoffman tagged with 'math'

The Riemann Hypothesis

The Riemann Hypothesis is, roughly speaking, a 150-year-old guess about how the prime numbers are spaced along the number line. Computers have been able to give very strong evidence for this guess, and hundreds of papers have been written assuming its validity. It is one of those rare problems that is both intelligible to the uninitiated and of deep mathematical interest. But despite the efforts of generations of the world’s best mathematicians, it has yet to be proved or disproved ...

Solving the Poincaré Conjecture

BERKELEY, Calif. - A reclusive Russian mathematician appears to have answered a question that has stumped mathematicians for more than a century. After a decade of isolation in St. Petersburg, over the last year Grigory Perelman posted a few papers...