Breakthrough of the Year!
From Devlin's Angle: "The image says it all. When SCIENCE magazine declares that the proof of a theorem in mathematics is the breakthrough of the year in all of science, you know that something special has occurred.
We've had a double wait for this breakthrough. Henri Poincare first formulated his now famous conjecture just over 100 years ago, in 1904, and despite several heroic attempts to prove it, the puzzle remained unsolved until late 2002 and through into 2003, when the somewhat reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted a series of three papers on the Internet that claimed to outline a proof of the Thurston Geometrization Conjecture, which was known to yield the Poincare Conjecture as a consequence.
That was the first wait. But another was in store. Such was the intricacy of Perelman's argument, compounded by the highly compressed manner in which he presented it, that is took over three years of effort by various groups around the world before the consensus agreement came in: he had indeed proved the Poincare Conjecture. (The experts are still unsure about Perelman's proof of the Geometrization Conjecture.)"
