Manifold Destiny (nonfiction)

"Manifold Destiny" is an article in The New Yorker written by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber and published in the August 28, 2006 issue of the magazine. It claims to give a detailed account (including interviews with many mathematicians) of some of the circumstances surrounding the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, one of the most important accomplishments of 20th and 21st century mathematics, and traces the attempts by three teams of mathematicians to verify the proof given by Grigori Perelman.

Subtitled "A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it", the article concentrates on the human drama of the story, especially the discussion on who contributed how much to the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. Interwoven with the article is an interview with the reclusive mathematician Grigori Perelman, whom the authors tracked down to the St. Petersburg apartment he shares with his mother, as well as interviews with many mathematicians. The article describes Perelman's disillusionment with and withdrawal from the mathematical community and paints an unflattering portrait of the 1982 Fields Medalist, Shing-Tung Yau. Yau has disputed the accuracy of the article and threatened legal action against the New Yorker. The New Yorker stood by its story and no lawsuit was filed.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Mathematics

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Mathematics (nonfiction)
• Manifold (nonfiction) - a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.
• Poincaré conjecture (nonfiction) - a theorem about the characterization of the 3-sphere, which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space. The conjecture states: "Every simply connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere."

External links

• Manifold Destiny @ Wikipedia