The Curious Wavefunction (Free subscription) | 11/14/2009
Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century Masha Gessen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) Pure mathematicians have the reputation of being otherworldly and divorced from practical matters. Grisha or Grigory Perelman, the Russian mathematician who at the turn of this century solved one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics, the Poincare Conjecture,...
DesiPundit (Free subscription) | 11/14/2009
Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century Masha Gessen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) Pure mathematicians have the reputation of being otherworldly and divorced from practical matters. Grisha or Grigory Perelman, the ...
The Geomblog (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Via Anand Kulkarni (aka polybot ) comes an interesting article in the WSJ by Masha Gessen on Grigori Perelman, Soviet-era mathematics and the question of 'big math'. The premise of the article (Masha Gessen has a book out on Perelman and the Poincare conjecture) is that special environments are needed to prove big results, and the Soviet-era mathematical enclaves fostered...
Not Even Wrong (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
I just finished reading author Masha Gessen’s new book about Grigori Perelman, Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century. It’s a short but very well done account of the life of Grigori Perelman, how he came to prove the Poincare Conjecture, and what has transpired since. The book is really not [...]
