Poincare Conjecture

In this short clip the Fields medallist tells us about his bad marks at school and his fascinatingly eclectic work as a mathematician.

The world we live in is strictly 3-dimensional: up/down, left/right, and forwards/backwards, these are the only ways to move. For years, scientists and science fiction writers have contemplated the possibilities of higher dimensional spaces. What would a 4- or 5-dimensional universe look like? Or might it even be true that we already inhabit such a space, that our 3-dimensional home is no more than a slice through a higher dimensional realm, just as a slice through a 3-dimensional cube produces a 2-dimensional square?

One of science's biggest prizes awarded for research into strings and knots
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The highest honour in maths has been awarded to four mathematicians
Regular Plus contributor Lewis Dartnell reports on the scramble for million-dollar prizes that made mathematical headlines at the BA Festival of Science in September 2004.
The mathematics of Grigori Perelman may earn him a million dollars, if no holes are found in his proof of the Poincaré Conjecture.
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  • We talk about a play that explores the fascinating mathematical collaboration between the mathematicians GH Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan.