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The Poincare Conjecture, By Donal O'Shea

Reviewed,Katy Guest
Friday 05 December 2008 01:00 GMT
Comments

Congratulations to Donal O'Shea for finding a way to present the human side of the conjecture: "Is it possible that the fundamental group of a manifold could be the identity, but that the manifold might not be homeomorphic to the three-dimensional sphere?" Since the theory was put by Henri Poincare more than 100 years ago, better men and women than us have dedicated their lives to proving it – and now somebody has. O'Shea achieves the even more remarkable feat of making maths interesting, while telling their stories.

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