X-Nico

4 unusual facts about History of manifolds and varieties


History of manifolds and varieties

In the mid nineteenth century, the Gauss–Bonnet theorem linked the Euler characteristic to the Gaussian curvature.

In 1857, Riemann introduced the concept of Riemann surfaces as part of a study of the process of analytic continuation; Riemann surfaces are now recognized as one-dimensional complex manifolds.

Henri Poincaré's 1895 paper Analysis Situs studied three-and-higher-dimensional manifolds(which he called "varieties"), giving rigorous definitions of homology, homotopy (which had originally been defined in the context of late nineteenth-century knot theory, developed by Maxwell and others), and Betti numbers and raised a question, today known as the Poincaré conjecture, based his new concept of the fundamental group.

In 2003, Grigori Perelman proved the conjecture using Richard Hamilton's Ricci flow, this is after nearly a century of effort by many mathematicians.



see also