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Geometrization
In mathematics, Thurston's geometrization conjecture states that each of certain three-dimensional topological spaces has a unique geometric structure that can be associated with it. It is an analogue of the uniformization theorem for two-dimensional surfaces, which states that every simply connected Riemann surface can be given one of three geometries ( Euclidean, spherical, or hyperbolic). In three dimensions, it is not always possible to assign a single geometry to a whole topological space. Instead, the geometrization conjecture states that every closed 3-manifold can be decomposed in a canonical way into pieces that each have one of eight types of geometric structure. The conjecture was proposed by , and implies several other conjectures, such as the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's elliptization conjecture. Thurston's hyperbolization theorem implies that Haken manifolds satisfy the geometrization conjecture. Thurston announced a proof in the 1980s and since ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grigori Perelman
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman ( rus, links=no, Григорий Яковлевич Перельман, p=ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲɪj ˈjakəvlʲɪvʲɪtɕ pʲɪrʲɪlʲˈman, a=Ru-Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman.oga; born 13 June 1966) is a Russian mathematician who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians. In the 1990s, partly in collaboration with Yuri Burago, Mikhael Gromov, and Anton Petrunin, he made contributions to the study of Alexandrov spaces. In 1994, he proved the soul conjecture in Riemannian geometry, which had been an open problem for the previous 20 years. In 2002 and 2003, he developed new techniques in the analysis of Ricci flow, and proved the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's geometrization conjecture, the former of which had been a famous open problem in mathematics for the past century. The full details of Perelman's work were fil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
3-manifold
In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a space that locally looks like Euclidean 3-dimensional space. A 3-manifold can be thought of as a possible shape of the universe. Just as a sphere looks like a plane to a small enough observer, all 3-manifolds look like our universe does to a small enough observer. This is made more precise in the definition below. Introduction Definition A topological space ''X'' is a 3-manifold if it is a second-countable Hausdorff space and if every point in ''X'' has a neighbourhood that is homeomorphic to Euclidean 3-space. Mathematical theory of 3-manifolds The topological, piecewise-linear, and smooth categories are all equivalent in three dimensions, so little distinction is made in whether we are dealing with say, topological 3-manifolds, or smooth 3-manifolds. Phenomena in three dimensions can be strikingly different from phenomena in other dimensions, and so there is a prevalence of very specialized techniques that do not generalize to dimensions g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hyperbolization Theorem
In geometry, Thurston's geometrization theorem or hyperbolization theorem implies that closed atoroidal Haken manifolds are hyperbolic, and in particular satisfy the Thurston conjecture. Statement One form of Thurston's geometrization theorem states: If ''M'' is a compact irreducible atoroidal Haken manifold whose boundary has zero Euler characteristic, then the interior of ''M'' has a complete hyperbolic structure of finite volume. The Mostow rigidity theorem implies that if a manifold of dimension at least 3 has a hyperbolic structure of finite volume, then it is essentially unique. The conditions that the manifold ''M'' should be irreducible and atoroidal are necessary, as hyperbolic manifolds have these properties. However the condition that the manifold be Haken is unnecessarily strong. Thurston's hyperbolization conjecture states that a closed irreducible atoroidal 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group is hyperbolic, and this follows from Perelman's proof of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poincaré Conjecture
In the mathematics, mathematical field of geometric topology, the Poincaré conjecture (, , ) is a theorem about the Characterization (mathematics), characterization of the 3-sphere, which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space. Originally conjectured by Henri Poincaré in 1904, the Grigori Perelman's theorem concerns spaces that locally look like ordinary Euclidean space, three-dimensional space but which are finite in extent. Poincaré hypothesized that if such a space has the additional property that each path (topology), loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point, then it is necessarily a 3-sphere, three-dimensional sphere. Attempts to resolve the conjecture drove much progress in the field of geometric topology during the 20th century. The Perelman's proof built upon Richard S. Hamilton's ideas of using the Ricci flow to solve the problem. By developing a number of breakthrough new techniques and results in the theory of Ricci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ricci Flow
In the mathematical fields of differential geometry and geometric analysis, the Ricci flow ( , ), sometimes also referred to as Hamilton's Ricci flow, is a certain partial differential equation for a Riemannian metric. It is often said to be analogous to the diffusion of heat and the heat equation, due to formal similarities in the mathematical structure of the equation. However, it is nonlinear and exhibits many phenomena not present in the study of the heat equation. The Ricci flow, so named for the presence of the Ricci tensor in its definition, was introduced by Richard Hamilton, who used it through the 1980s to prove striking new results in Riemannian geometry. Later extensions of Hamilton's methods by various authors resulted in new applications to geometry, including the resolution of the differentiable sphere conjecture by Simon Brendle and Richard Schoen. Following Shing-Tung Yau's suggestion that the singularities of solutions of the Ricci flow could identify the topo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Thurston
William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds. Thurston was a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, University of California, Davis, and Cornell University. He was also a director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Early life and education William Thurston was born in Washington, D.C. to Margaret Thurston (), a seamstress, and Paul Thurston, an aeronautical engineer. William Thurston suffered from congenital strabismus as a child, causing issues with depth perception. His mother worked with him as a toddler to reconstruct three-dimensional images from two-dimensional ones. He received his bachelor's degree from New College in 1967 as part of its inaugural class. For his undergraduate thesis, he developed an intuitionist foundation for topology. Following this, he r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manifold
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open subset of n-dimensional Euclidean space. One-dimensional manifolds include lines and circles, but not lemniscates. Two-dimensional manifolds are also called surfaces. Examples include the plane, the sphere, and the torus, and also the Klein bottle and real projective plane. The concept of a manifold is central to many parts of geometry and modern mathematical physics because it allows complicated structures to be described in terms of well-understood topological properties of simpler spaces. Manifolds naturally arise as solution sets of systems of equations and as graphs of functions. The concept has applications in computer-graphics given the need to associate pictures with coordinates (e.g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Haken Manifold
In mathematics, a Haken manifold is a compact, P²-irreducible 3-manifold that is sufficiently large, meaning that it contains a properly embedded two-sided incompressible surface. Sometimes one considers only orientable Haken manifolds, in which case a Haken manifold is a compact, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold that contains an orientable, incompressible surface. A 3-manifold finitely covered by a Haken manifold is said to be virtually Haken. The Virtually Haken conjecture asserts that every compact, irreducible 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group is virtually Haken. This conjecture was proven by Ian Agol. Haken manifolds were introduced by . proved that Haken manifolds have a hierarchy, where they can be split up into 3-balls along incompressible surfaces. Haken also showed that there was a finite procedure to find an incompressible surface if the 3-manifold had one. gave an algorithm to determine if a 3-manifold was Haken. Normal surfaces are ubiquitous in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elliptization Conjecture
William Thurston's elliptization conjecture states that a closed 3-manifold with finite fundamental group is spherical, i.e. has a Riemannian metric of constant positive sectional curvature. Relation to other conjectures A 3-manifold with a Riemannian metric of constant positive sectional curvature is covered by the 3-sphere, moreover the group of covering transformations are isometries of the 3-sphere. If the original 3-manifold had in fact a trivial fundamental group, then it is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere In mathematics, a 3-sphere is a higher-dimensional analogue of a sphere. It may be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space as the set of points equidistant from a fixed central point. Analogous to how the boundary of a ball in three dimensi ... (via the covering map). Thus, proving the elliptization conjecture would prove the Poincaré conjecture as a corollary. In fact, the elliptization conjecture is logically equivalent to two simpler conjectures: the Poinca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seifert Manifold
A Seifert fiber space is a 3-manifold together with a decomposition as a disjoint union of circles. In other words, it is a S^1-bundle (circle bundle) over a 2-dimensional orbifold. Many 3-manifolds are Seifert fiber spaces, and they account for all compact oriented manifolds in 6 of the 8 Thurston geometries of the geometrization conjecture. Definition A Seifert manifold is a closed 3-manifold together with a decomposition into a disjoint union of circles (called fibers) such that each fiber has a tubular neighborhood that forms a standard fibered torus. A standard fibered torus corresponding to a pair of coprime integers (a,b) with a>0 is the surface bundle of the automorphism of a disk given by rotation by an angle of 2\pi b/a (with the natural fibering by circles). If a=1 the middle fiber is called ordinary, while if a>1 the middle fiber is called exceptional. A compact Seifert fiber space has only a finite number of exceptional fibers. The set of fibers forms a 2-dimensio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uniformization Theorem
In mathematics, the uniformization theorem says that every simply connected Riemann surface is conformally equivalent to one of three Riemann surfaces: the open unit disk, the complex plane, or the Riemann sphere. The theorem is a generalization of the Riemann mapping theorem from simply connected open subsets of the plane to arbitrary simply connected Riemann surfaces. Since every Riemann surface has a universal cover which is a simply connected Riemann surface, the uniformization theorem leads to a classification of Riemann surfaces into three types: those that have the Riemann sphere as universal cover ("elliptic"), those with the plane as universal cover ("parabolic") and those with the unit disk as universal cover ("hyperbolic"). It further follows that every Riemann surface admits a Riemannian metric of constant curvature, where the curvature can be taken to be 1 in the elliptic, 0 in the parabolic and -1 in the hyperbolic case. The uniformization theorem also yields a simi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thurston Elliptization Conjecture
William Thurston's elliptization conjecture states that a closed 3-manifold with finite fundamental group is spherical, i.e. has a Riemannian metric of constant positive sectional curvature. Relation to other conjectures A 3-manifold with a Riemannian metric of constant positive sectional curvature is covered by the 3-sphere, moreover the group of covering transformations are isometries of the 3-sphere. If the original 3-manifold had in fact a trivial fundamental group, then it is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere In mathematics, a 3-sphere is a higher-dimensional analogue of a sphere. It may be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space as the set of points equidistant from a fixed central point. Analogous to how the boundary of a ball in three dimensi ... (via the covering map). Thus, proving the elliptization conjecture would prove the Poincaré conjecture as a corollary. In fact, the elliptization conjecture is logically equivalent to two simpler conjectures: the Poinca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
