Towards the Poincaré Conjecture and the Classification of 3-Manifolds, Volume 50, Number 10

1226 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 50, NUMBER 10 T he Poincaré Conjecture was posed ninetynine years ago and may possibly have been proved in the last few months. This note will be an account of some of the major results over the past hundred years which have paved the way towards a proof and towards the even more ambitious project of classifying all compact 3-dimensional manifolds. The final paragraph provides a brief description of the latest developments, due to Grigory Perelman. A more serious discussion of Perelman’s work will be provided in a subsequent note by Michael Anderson.

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