Title: Poincare's Prize
Subtitle: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math's Greatest Puzzles
First published: 2007
Description: In the tradition of Fermat’s Enigma and Prime Obsession, George Szpiro brings to life the giants of mathematics who struggled to prove a theorem for a century and the mysterious man from St. Petersburg, Grigory Perelman, who fi nally accomplished the impossible. In 1904 Henri Poincare developed the Poincare Conjecture, an attempt to understand higher-dimensional space and possibly the shape of the universe. Th e problem was he couldn’t prove it. A century later it was named a Millennium Prize problem, one of the seven hardest problems we can imagine. Now this holy grail of mathematics has been found. Accessibly interweaving history and math, Szpiro captures the passion, frustration, and excitement of the hunt, and provides a fascinating portrait of a contemporary noble-genius.
Subjects: Mathematics, Nonfiction, Problems, exercises, Popular works, Poincare Conjecture, History, Poincaré conjecture, Mathematics, competitions, Mathematics, popular works, Poincare, henri, 1854-1912
LC classification: QA43 .S985 2007