"O'Shea tells the fascinating story of this mathematical mystery and its solution by the eccentric Mr. Perelman."--"Wall Street Journal "In 1904, Henri Poincare, a giant among mathematicians who transformed the fledging area of topology into a powerful field essential to all mathematics and physics, posed the Poincare conjecture, a tantalizing puzzle that speaks to the possible shape of the universe. For more than a century, the conjecture resisted attempts to prove or disprove it. As Donal O'Shea reveals in his elegant narrative, Poincare's conjecture opens a door to the history of geometry, from the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece to the celebrated geniuses of the nineteenth-century German academy and, ultimately, to a fascinating array of personalities--Poincare and Bernhard Riemann, William Thurston and Richard Hamilton, and the eccentric genius who appears to have solved it, Grigory Perelman. The solution seems certain to open up new corners of the mathematical universe.

多纳尔·欧谢是马塞诸塞州曼荷莲学院的伊丽莎白·T·凯南讲席教授。在过去的25年里,他的著作和论文被世界范围的学者们阅读,并被翻译成多种欧洲文字,以及俄文、中文和日文。欧谢是高维空间奇点拓扑学和几何学方面的专家。