Wonderfest: Beauty of the Poincaré Conjecture

At the turn of the new millennium, a renowned mathematics institute pledged $7 million for the solution of seven special math problems, $1 million each. Only one of these seven Millennium Prize Problems has been solved. That problem, originally posed over a century ago by Henri Poincaré, asked a deep question about the nature of 3-dimensional space. Its resolution opened our (mathematical) eyes to the beauty of 3-dimensional universes - filled with curved geometries, wormholes, and a whole lot of pretty math. This presentation, assuming only a high school math background, will explore the beauty of these spacey ideas in mathematical topology.

Speaker: Steve Trettel, University of San Francisco