2 comments from John Stallings re the Poincare conjecture. The first was from him to Stasheff (with an understanding that it could be posted), and the second was directly to me for posting. As most of you know, Stallings proved a version of the PC in large dimensions in 1960 ...........DMD _________________________________________________ Subject: [Fwd: a paper well remembered] Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 14:04:21 -0400 From: jim stasheff To: dondavis , John Stallings "John R. Stallings" wrote: In re: How not to prove the Poincare' conjecture' > Annals Study 60 1966 "Topology Seminar Wisconsin 1965". > > Hmmm, one thing I notice is that I have improved my Acrobat Reader to 5.0 > and it makes things look pretty bad, so if you have that, my advice would > be to look at the .ps version on my www page, if it exists, or to use > an older version of Acrobat. My www page is something like this: > http://math.berkeley.edu/~stall > and it contains all kinds of wondrous things which, however, are boring > to everybody but me. > > Thanx for the interest, Jim. > > I haven't heard anything recently about Dunwoody's proof of the PC. I am > hoping to hear a lot about proofs by other people that this will bring out > of the closet. I'm also hoping that someone other than Winkelnkemper will > have a counterexample. One of the guys that proved the PC 15 years ago, > during the Rourke-Rego and Poenaru and Michelangelo Vaccaro and He Bai-He > and so on proofs, is spending his retirement here in Berkeley; Steve > Armentrout; and he seems somewhat skeptical. Also I've heard skeptical > words from Hyam Rubinstein and Jaco. I myself have had trouble getting > past the 10th line of Dunwoody, and I wonder where really the simple > connectivity is used seriously. > > John ______________________________________________ Subject: Re: [Fwd: a paper well remembered] Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 20:15:09 -0700 (PDT) From: "John R. Stallings" To: dmd1@lehigh.edu, stall@math.berkeley.edu, stasheff@email.unc.edu Well, I guess I don't have anything that I would consider to be official remarks about the latest Poincare Conjecture thing. I clearly have not read Dunwoody's paper in any detail, and I have lots of doubts, naturally. I got some email from Hyam Rubinstein about it that seemed to be doubtful, but if you want to get an opinion from him, you should get it from him and not me. If you or anybody wants to post the link to my recent Texing of how not to prove the PC, that would be fine with me, of course. I don't know if there's some copyright thing involving the Annals Studies of yore, but probably nothing much. My theory is that Scharlemann and Thompson and Rubinstein might be the ones to try to comprehend what Dunwoody's techniques are all about. John