About a hundred years ago David Hilbert, a German mathematician

presented twenty-three math puzzles to the International Congress of

athematicians! "oday, only three remain unsolved! Added to those were
four more unsolvable problems! "he seven famous unsolved math puzzles
that have resisted all attempts to solve are listed here# "he $irch and
%winnerton-Dyer Con&ecture, "he 'avier-%to(es )*uation, "he +oincare
Con&ecture, "he ,iemann Hypothesis -the oldest and most famous., "he +
/erses '+ +roblem, "he Hodge Con&ecture, 0ang-ills )1istence and ass
Gap! any e1perts believe that solving these problems would lead to
e1traordinary advances in physics, medicine and many other un(nown areas
in the world of math!
The Poincare conjecture
If you stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can
shrin( it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without
allowing it to leave the surface! $ut if you were to stretch a rubber band
around the surface of a doughnut, then there is no way of shrin(ing it to a
point without brea(ing either the rubber band or the doughnut! "herefore
the surface of an apple is 2simply connected,3 and the one of the doughnut is
not! About a hundred years ago, +oincare (new that a two dimensional
sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity!
He as(ed the corresponding *uestion for the three dimensional sphere- the
set of points in four-dimensional space at unit distance from the origin! As it
turns out, this is an e1traordinarily difficult *uestion to be answered!
Henri +oincare practically invented topology while trying to
understand the set of solutions to a general algebraic e*uation f-1,y,z.45,
where 1,y,z are comple1 numbers! After trying the analytic approach, he
began assigning algebraic invariants to geometric ob&ects as an approach to
classifying the ob&ects! "ranslated into )nglish, +oincare said consider a
compact 6-dimensional manifold / without boundary! Is it possible that the
fundamental group of /-could be trivial, even though / is not
homeomorphic to the 6-dimensional sphere7 %ince 895:, the hypothesis that
every simply connected closed 6-manifold is homeomorphic to the 6-sphere
has been (nown as the +oincare con&ecture! ;our years earlier he had stated
that every compact polyhedral manifold with the homology of an n-
dimensional sphere is actually homeomorphic to the n-dimensional sphere!
However in 895: he had constructed a countere1ample to this statement by
developing the concept of fundamental group! In doing so he basically
invented the fundamental group of space! "he coset space cubed4%<-6.=I
where I is the group of rotations which carry a regular icosahedron onto
itself! "his space has a non-trivial fundamental group - . of order 8>5!
Henry ?hitehead made another false theorem in 896: when he
published a proof of the +oincare Con&ecture, claiming that every
contractible open 6-dimensional manifold is homeomorphic to )uclidean
space! $y creating a countere1ample to his own theorem he increased our
understanding of the topology of manifolds! A contractible manifold which
is not simply connected at infinity, the complement % " is the re*uired
?hitehead countere1ample!
Whiteheads proof: Take your simply connected 3-manifold M, and
remove a point, to get a non-compact manifold X. If you did this to what you
think M is, namely the 3-sphere, you would get !3. In general, the only
thing you can immediately say is the X is contracti"le# it can "e
continuously deformed within itself to a point! He was wrong! About a year
later he published a countere1ample in the form of an e1ample of a
contractible 6-manifold which isn@t homeomorphic to ,A6!
"he discovery that higher dimensional manifolds are easier to wor(
with than 6-dimensional manifolds, in the 89B5@s and 89C5@s, was ma&or
progress! %tephen %male announced a proof of the +oincare con&ecture in
high dimensions in 89C5! Dohn %tallings, using a dissimilar method,
promptly followed! %oon Andrew ?allace followed, using similar
techni*ues as those of %tallings! %talling@s result has a wea( hypotheses and
easier proof therefore having a wea(er conclusion as well, assuming that the
dimension is seven or more! Eater, Feeman e1tended his argument to
dimensions of five and si1! The Stallings-Zeeman Theorem- -"he method
of proof consists of pushing all of the difficulties off towards a single point,
so that there can be no control near that point!. If is a finite simplicial
comple1 of dimension nGB which has the homotopy type of the sphere %
and is locally piecewise linearly homeomorphic to the )uclidean space , ,
then is homeomorphic to % under a homoeomorphism which is
piecewise linear e1cept at a single point! In other words, the complement
H-point. is piecewise linearly homeomorphic to , !
However, the %male proof and ?allace proof, closely related and
given shortly after %male@s, depended on differentiable methods that builded
a manifold up inductively starting with an n-dimensional ball, by
successively adding handles! Smale Theorem - If is a differentiable
homotopy sphere of dimension nGB, then is homeomorphic to % ! In fact
is diffeomorphic to a manifold obtained by gluing together the
boundaries of two closed n-balls under a suitable diffeomorphism! ?allace
proved this for nGC! ichael ;reedman did the much more difficult wor(,
the :-dimensional case! He used wildly non-differentiable methods to prove
it and also to give a complete classification of closed simply connected
topological :-manifolds! Freedman Theorem- "wo closed simply
connected :-manifolds are homeomorphic if and only if they have the same
bilinear form $ and the same Iirby%iebenmann invariant I! Any $ can be
realized by such a manifold! If $- . is odd for some H , then either value
of I can be realized also! However, if $- . is always even, then I is
determined by $, being congruent to one eighth of the signature of $!
$ottom line# the differentiable methods used by %male and ?allace and the
non-differentiable methods used by %tallings and Feeman don@t wor(! $ut
;reedman did show that , admits unaccountably many in e*uivalent
differentiable structures using Donaldson@s wor(!
A con&ecture by "hurston holds that every three manifold can be cut
up along >-spheres so as to decompose into essentially uni*ue pieces, that
each have a simple geometrical structure! "here are eight 6-dimensional
geometries in "hurston@s program! ?ell understood are si1 of them! )ven
thought there has been great advances in the field of geometry of constant
negative curvature, the eighth geometry corresponding to constant positive
curvature, remains largely untouched! Thurston Elliptization Conjecture-
)very closed 6-manifold with finite fundamental groups have a metric of
constant positive curvature, and hence is homeomorphic to a *uotient % = ,
where %<-:. is a finite group of rotations which acts freely on % !
"he idea of creating a countere1ample is easy enough# build a 6-
manifold whose fundamental group you can compute is trivial -the
homology groups then actually come for free. and then try to show that you
were luc(y enough to build something that isn@t a 6-sphere! "he last part is
the part that nobody could ever figure out so their time was mostly spent
trying to find invariants that had a chance of distinguishing a homotopy 6-
sphere from the 6-sphere! It@s obvious why these puzzles are worth a million
dollars! It@s amazing that so many people have done this problem wrong
after trying for so many years! It really puts our limited studies of
mathematics in perspective!