2 postings: A Poincare Conj update and a conference update ...........DMD ______________________________________ Subject: Re: 4 postings Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 08:26:29 -0400 (EDT) From: Joan Birman On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Don Davis wrote: > > A colleague picked up yesterday off the internet an > > announcement of a proof of the Poincare Conjecture > > by M.J.Dunwoody. It is five pages long, and appears > > to be a serious manuscript. Does anyone know about > > the status of this?..............DMD > > The preprint can be downloaded from the University of Southampton > preprint server: http://www.maths.soton.ac.uk/pure/preprints.phtml > > Jim Cruickshank I just returned from a conference at the University of Warwick, and Dunwoody was there. There was a poster session, and he posted his sketch of a proof of the PC. The ideas behind his work seem serious and sound, but the proof is vague in places which appear to need hard work. Dunwoody was invited to give a seminar to the assembled experts, but declined to do so. The version that I saw was #7, with successive versions correcting mistakes that had been noted in earlier ones, none fatal. The basic idea is to use Hyam Rubinstein's algorithm for recognizing $S^3$ as the basis for a proof that any homotopy $S^3$ must be $S^3$. I have not studied his paper in any detail and hesitated to answer this until I saw that nobody else was doing so either. As noted above, his preprint can be downloaded from the www. Sincerely, Joan Birman