Subject: Response to Vitali Kapovitch letter Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 09:41:01 +0100 From: Krzysztof Pawalowski To: Don Davis > Dear Professor Davis, > Please post the following as a response to Pawalowski's question on > Poincare conjecture: > > Nikitin uses a wrong definition of simply connectedness (page 11). > He calls a simplicial complex simply connected if any embedded circle > in the 1-skeleton bounds and EMBEDDED 2-disk (i.e all circles in the > 1-skeleton are unknotted). I've stopped reading after that so > I don't know if there are any more issues. > Vitali Kapovitch As Andrew Ranicki has pointed out to me, at the web page http://mathforum.org/epigone/sci.math.research/slultwilspand/f18e1pyhy97y@legacy there is a copy of the e-mail Christophe Margerin sent to Sergey Nikitin giving a counter-example to the main statement ("normal form": thm 2.8) of Nikitin's paper. As Christophe Margerin writes, the construction is very elementary and does not require any sophisticated concept nor argument, but it leaves almost no hope to fix Nikitin's "proof". Krzysztof Pawalowski (kpa).