Dylan Thurston <dthurston@barnard.edu> sent this. -- Rich ---------------- On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 02:35:19PM -0500, dasimov@earthlink.net wrote:
In Fall, 2002, the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted to the math ArXiv website some papers claiming to prove W. Thurston's geometrization conjecture (TGC) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrization_conjecture>. ... (I believe there is at least one piece of the TGC proof that Perelman has promised to post on the ArXiv, but has not yet done so.)
That's right; furthermore, it seems unlikely he will post it at this point.
... That October, John Morgan of Columbia published an article written in August, 2004 that discussed Perelman's work, but he dd not affirm that the proof was correct.
John Morgan is now more optimistic, and is currently co-writing an article that will have the proof; this article will be peer reviewed.
Assuming the absence of reliable automated theorem-checkers for this kind of proof, how do we decide when Perelman's work is correct?
As someone else said: it's a sociological thing.
(Incidentally, he has apparently never submitted it to a peer-reviewed journal, ...
He now apparently says that he's not interested in getting it published.
but some sources say it's already gotten much more careful scrutiny than most such submissions would.)
Yes, but it's also harder than many other papers. Peace, Dylan Thurston