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Commentary on the Kervaire–Milnor Correspondence 1958–1961
BULLETIN (New Series) OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY Volume 52, Number 4, October 2015, Pages 603–609 http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/bull/1508 Article electronically published on July 1, 2015 COMMENTARY ON THE KERVAIRE–MILNOR CORRESPONDENCE 1958–1961 ANDREW RANICKI AND CLAUDE WEBER Abstract. The extant letters exchanged between Kervaire and Milnor during their collaboration from 1958–1961 concerned their work on the classification of exotic spheres, culminating in their 1963 Annals of Mathematics paper. Michel Kervaire died in 2007; for an account of his life, see the obituary by Shalom Eliahou, Pierre de la Harpe, Jean-Claude Hausmann, and Claude We- ber in the September 2008 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The letters were made public at the 2009 Kervaire Memorial Confer- ence in Geneva. Their publication in this issue of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society is preceded by our commentary on these letters, provid- ing some historical background. Letter 1. From Milnor, 22 August 1958 Kervaire and Milnor both attended the International Congress of Mathemati- cians held in Edinburgh, 14–21 August 1958. Milnor gave an invited half-hour talk on Bernoulli numbers, homotopy groups, and a theorem of Rohlin,andKer- vaire gave a talk in the short communications section on Non-parallelizability of the n-sphere for n>7 (see [2]). In this letter written immediately after the Congress, Milnor invites Kervaire to join him in writing up the lecture he gave at the Con- gress. The joint paper appeared in the Proceedings of the ICM as [10]. Milnor’s name is listed first (contrary to the tradition in mathematics) since it was he who was invited to deliver a talk. -
Arxiv:Math/0701389V3 [Math.DG] 11 Apr 2007 Hoesadcnetrsi Hssbet E H Uvyb B by Survey the See Subject
EXAMPLES OF RIEMANNIAN MANIFOLDS WITH NON-NEGATIVE SECTIONAL CURVATURE WOLFGANG ZILLER Manifolds with non-negative sectional curvature have been of interest since the beginning of global Riemannian geometry, as illustrated by the theorems of Bonnet-Myers, Synge, and the sphere theorem. Some of the oldest conjectures in global Riemannian geometry, as for example the Hopf conjecture on S2 S2, also fit into this subject. For non-negatively curved manifolds, there× are a number of obstruction theorems known, see Section 1 below and the survey by Burkhard Wilking in this volume. It is somewhat surprising that the only further obstructions to positive curvature are given by the classical Bonnet-Myers and Synge theorems on the fundamental group. Although there are many examples with non-negative curvature, they all come from two basic constructions, apart from taking products. One is taking an isometric quotient of a compact Lie group equipped with a biinvariant metric and another a gluing procedure due to Cheeger and recently significantly generalized by Grove-Ziller. The latter examples include a rich class of manifolds, and give rise to non-negative curvature on many exotic 7-spheres. On the other hand, known manifolds with positive sectional curvature are very rare, and are all given by quotients of compact Lie groups, and, apart from the classical rank one symmetric spaces, only exist in dimension below 25. Due to this lack of knowledge, it is therefore of importance to discuss and understand known examples and find new ones. In this survey we will concentrate on the description of known examples, although the last section also contains suggestions where to look for new ones. -
George W. Whitehead Jr
George W. Whitehead Jr. 1918–2004 A Biographical Memoir by Haynes R. Miller ©2015 National Academy of Sciences. Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. GEORGE WILLIAM WHITEHEAD JR. August 2, 1918–April 12 , 2004 Elected to the NAS, 1972 Life George William Whitehead, Jr., was born in Bloomington, Ill., on August 2, 1918. Little is known about his family or early life. Whitehead received a BA from the University of Chicago in 1937, and continued at Chicago as a graduate student. The Chicago Mathematics Department was somewhat ingrown at that time, dominated by L. E. Dickson and Gilbert Bliss and exhibiting “a certain narrowness of focus: the calculus of variations, projective differential geometry, algebra and number theory were the main topics of interest.”1 It is possible that Whitehead’s interest in topology was stimulated by Saunders Mac Lane, who By Haynes R. Miller spent the 1937–38 academic year at the University of Chicago and was then in the early stages of his shift of interest from logic and algebra to topology. Of greater importance for Whitehead was the appearance of Norman Steenrod in Chicago. Steenrod had been attracted to topology by Raymond Wilder at the University of Michigan, received a PhD under Solomon Lefschetz in 1936, and remained at Princeton as an Instructor for another three years. He then served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago between 1939 and 1942 (at which point he moved to the University of Michigan). -
Of the American Mathematical Society August 2017 Volume 64, Number 7
ISSN 0002-9920 (print) ISSN 1088-9477 (online) of the American Mathematical Society August 2017 Volume 64, Number 7 The Mathematics of Gravitational Waves: A Two-Part Feature page 684 The Travel Ban: Affected Mathematicians Tell Their Stories page 678 The Global Math Project: Uplifting Mathematics for All page 712 2015–2016 Doctoral Degrees Conferred page 727 Gravitational waves are produced by black holes spiraling inward (see page 674). American Mathematical Society LEARNING ® MEDIA MATHSCINET ONLINE RESOURCES MATHEMATICS WASHINGTON, DC CONFERENCES MATHEMATICAL INCLUSION REVIEWS STUDENTS MENTORING PROFESSION GRAD PUBLISHING STUDENTS OUTREACH TOOLS EMPLOYMENT MATH VISUALIZATIONS EXCLUSION TEACHING CAREERS MATH STEM ART REVIEWS MEETINGS FUNDING WORKSHOPS BOOKS EDUCATION MATH ADVOCACY NETWORKING DIVERSITY blogs.ams.org Notices of the American Mathematical Society August 2017 FEATURED 684684 718 26 678 Gravitational Waves The Graduate Student The Travel Ban: Affected Introduction Section Mathematicians Tell Their by Christina Sormani Karen E. Smith Interview Stories How the Green Light was Given for by Laure Flapan Gravitational Wave Research by Alexander Diaz-Lopez, Allyn by C. Denson Hill and Paweł Nurowski WHAT IS...a CR Submanifold? Jackson, and Stephen Kennedy by Phillip S. Harrington and Andrew Gravitational Waves and Their Raich Mathematics by Lydia Bieri, David Garfinkle, and Nicolás Yunes This season of the Perseid meteor shower August 12 and the third sighting in June make our cover feature on the discovery of gravitational waves -
Millennium Prize for the Poincaré
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE • March 18, 2010 Press contact: James Carlson: [email protected]; 617-852-7490 See also the Clay Mathematics Institute website: • The Poincaré conjecture and Dr. Perelmanʼs work: http://www.claymath.org/poincare • The Millennium Prizes: http://www.claymath.org/millennium/ • Full text: http://www.claymath.org/poincare/millenniumprize.pdf First Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize Announced Today Prize for Resolution of the Poincaré Conjecture a Awarded to Dr. Grigoriy Perelman The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) announces today that Dr. Grigoriy Perelman of St. Petersburg, Russia, is the recipient of the Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. The citation for the award reads: The Clay Mathematics Institute hereby awards the Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture to Grigoriy Perelman. The Poincaré conjecture is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems established by CMI in 2000. The Prizes were conceived to record some of the most difficult problems with which mathematicians were grappling at the turn of the second millennium; to elevate in the consciousness of the general public the fact that in mathematics, the frontier is still open and abounds in important unsolved problems; to emphasize the importance of working towards a solution of the deepest, most difficult problems; and to recognize achievement in mathematics of historical magnitude. The award of the Millennium Prize to Dr. Perelman was made in accord with their governing rules: recommendation first by a Special Advisory Committee (Simon Donaldson, David Gabai, Mikhail Gromov, Terence Tao, and Andrew Wiles), then by the CMI Scientific Advisory Board (James Carlson, Simon Donaldson, Gregory Margulis, Richard Melrose, Yum-Tong Siu, and Andrew Wiles), with final decision by the Board of Directors (Landon T. -
A Gauss-Bonnet Theorem for Manifolds with Asymptotically Conical Ends and Manifolds with Conical Singularities
A Gauss-Bonnet Theorem for Asymptotically Conical Manifolds and Manifolds with Conical Singularities. Thèse N° 9275 Présentée le 25 janvier 2019 à la Faculté des sciences de base Groupe Troyanov Programme doctoral en mathématiques pour l’obtention du grade de Docteur ès Sciences par ADRIEN GIULIANO MARCONE Acceptée sur proposition du jury Prof. K. Hess Bellwald, présidente du jury Prof. M. Troyanov, directeur de thèse Prof. A. Bernig, rapporteur Dr I. Izmestiev, rapporteur Prof. J. Krieger, rapporteur 2019 Remerciements En tout premier lieu je souhaite remercier mon directeur de thèse le professeur Marc Troyanov. Ses conseils avisés tout au long de ces quatre années ainsi que son soutien, tant moral que mathématique, ont été indispensables à la réalisation de ce travail. Cependant, réduire ce qu’il m’a appris au seul domaine scientifique serait inexact et je suis fier de dire qu’il est devenu pour moi aujourd’hui un ami. Secondly I want to express all my gratitude to the members of my committee: 1) the director: Professor K. Hess Bellwald, whom I know since the first day of my studies and who has always been a source of inspiration; 2) the internal expert: Professor J. Krieger, whose courses were among the best I took at EPFL; 3) the external experts: Professor A. Bernig (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), who accepted to be part of this jury despite a truly busy schedule, and Dr I. Iz- mestiev (Université de Fribourg) who kindly invited me to the Oberseminar in Fribourg; for accepting to review my thesis. Merci au Professeur Dalang qui a eu la générosité de financer la fin de mon doc- torat. -
The Arf-Kervaire Invariant Problem in Algebraic Topology: Introduction
THE ARF-KERVAIRE INVARIANT PROBLEM IN ALGEBRAIC TOPOLOGY: INTRODUCTION MICHAEL A. HILL, MICHAEL J. HOPKINS, AND DOUGLAS C. RAVENEL ABSTRACT. This paper gives the history and background of one of the oldest problems in algebraic topology, along with a short summary of our solution to it and a description of some of the tools we use. More details of the proof are provided in our second paper in this volume, The Arf-Kervaire invariant problem in algebraic topology: Sketch of the proof. A rigorous account can be found in our preprint The non-existence of elements of Kervaire invariant one on the arXiv and on the third author’s home page. The latter also has numerous links to related papers and talks we have given on the subject since announcing our result in April, 2009. CONTENTS 1. Background and history 3 1.1. Pontryagin’s early work on homotopy groups of spheres 3 1.2. Our main result 8 1.3. The manifold formulation 8 1.4. The unstable formulation 12 1.5. Questions raised by our theorem 14 2. Our strategy 14 2.1. Ingredients of the proof 14 2.2. The spectrum Ω 15 2.3. How we construct Ω 15 3. Some classical algebraic topology. 15 3.1. Fibrations 15 3.2. Cofibrations 18 3.3. Eilenberg-Mac Lane spaces and cohomology operations 18 3.4. The Steenrod algebra. 19 3.5. Milnor’s formulation 20 3.6. Serre’s method of computing homotopy groups 21 3.7. The Adams spectral sequence 21 4. Spectra and equivariant spectra 23 4.1. -
On Index Expectation Curvature for Manifolds 11
ON INDEX EXPECTATION CURVATURE FOR MANIFOLDS OLIVER KNILL Abstract. Index expectation curvature K(x) = E[if (x)] on a compact Riemannian 2d- manifold M is an expectation of Poincar´e-Hopfindices if (x) and so satisfies the Gauss-Bonnet R relation M K(x) dV (x) = χ(M). Unlike the Gauss-Bonnet-Chern integrand, these curvatures are in general non-local. We show that for small 2d-manifolds M with boundary embedded in a parallelizable 2d-manifold N of definite sectional curvature sign e, an index expectation K(x) d Q with definite sign e exists. The function K(x) is constructed as a product k Kk(x) of sec- tional index expectation curvature averages E[ik(x)] of a probability space of Morse functions Q f for which if (x) = ik(x), where the ik are independent and so uncorrelated. 1. Introduction 1.1. The Hopf sign conjecture [16, 5, 6] states that a compact Riemannian 2d-manifold M with definite sectional curvature sign e has Euler characteristic χ(M) with sign ed. The problem was stated first explicitly in talks of Hopf given in Switzerland and Germany in 1931 [16]. In the case of non-negative or non-positive curvature, it appeared in [6] and a talk of 1960 [9]. They appear as problems 8) and 10) in Yau's list of problems [25]. As mentioned in [5], earlier work of Hopf already was motivated by these line of questions. The answer is settled positively in the case d = 1 (Gauss-Bonnet) and d = 2 (Milnor), if M is a hypersurface in R2d+1 (Hopf) [15] or in R2d+2 (Weinstein) [23] or in the case of positively sufficiently pinched curvature, because of sphere theorems (Rauch,Klingenberg,Berger) [22, 10] spheres and projective spaces in even dimension have positive Euler characteristic. -
Pierre Deligne
www.abelprize.no Pierre Deligne Pierre Deligne was born on 3 October 1944 as a hobby for his own personal enjoyment. in Etterbeek, Brussels, Belgium. He is Profes- There, as a student of Jacques Tits, Deligne sor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics at was pleased to discover that, as he says, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, “one could earn one’s living by playing, i.e. by New Jersey, USA. Deligne came to Prince- doing research in mathematics.” ton in 1984 from Institut des Hautes Études After a year at École Normal Supériure in Scientifiques (IHÉS) at Bures-sur-Yvette near Paris as auditeur libre, Deligne was concur- Paris, France, where he was appointed its rently a junior scientist at the Belgian National youngest ever permanent member in 1970. Fund for Scientific Research and a guest at When Deligne was around 12 years of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques age, he started to read his brother’s university (IHÉS). Deligne was a visiting member at math books and to demand explanations. IHÉS from 1968-70, at which time he was His interest prompted a high-school math appointed a permanent member. teacher, J. Nijs, to lend him several volumes Concurrently, he was a Member (1972– of “Elements of Mathematics” by Nicolas 73, 1977) and Visitor (1981) in the School of Bourbaki, the pseudonymous grey eminence Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced that called for a renovation of French mathe- Study. He was appointed to a faculty position matics. This was not the kind of reading mat- there in 1984. -
Math, Physics, and Calabi–Yau Manifolds
Math, Physics, and Calabi–Yau Manifolds Shing-Tung Yau Harvard University October 2011 Introduction I’d like to talk about how mathematics and physics can come together to the benefit of both fields, particularly in the case of Calabi-Yau spaces and string theory. This happens to be the subject of the new book I coauthored, THE SHAPE OF INNER SPACE It also tells some of my own story and a bit of the history of geometry as well. 2 In that spirit, I’m going to back up and talk about my personal introduction to geometry and how I ended up spending much of my career working at the interface between math and physics. Along the way, I hope to give people a sense of how mathematicians think and approach the world. I also want people to realize that mathematics does not have to be a wholly abstract discipline, disconnected from everyday phenomena, but is instead crucial to our understanding of the physical world. 3 There are several major contributions of mathematicians to fundamental physics in 20th century: 1. Poincar´eand Minkowski contribution to special relativity. (The book of Pais on the biography of Einstein explained this clearly.) 2. Contributions of Grossmann and Hilbert to general relativity: Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936) was a classmate with Einstein from 1898 to 1900. he was professor of geometry at ETH, Switzerland at 1907. In 1912, Einstein came to ETH to be professor where they started to work together. Grossmann suggested tensor calculus, as was proposed by Elwin Bruno Christoffel in 1868 (Crelle journal) and developed by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita (1901). -
Kepler's Laws, Newton's Laws, and the Search for New Planets
Integre Technical Publishing Co., Inc. American Mathematical Monthly 108:9 July 12, 2001 2:22 p.m. osserman.tex page 813 Kepler’s Laws, Newton’s Laws, and the Search for New Planets Robert Osserman Introduction. One of the high points of elementary calculus is the derivation of Ke- pler’s empirically deduced laws of planetary motion from Newton’s Law of Gravity and his second law of motion. However, the standard treatment of the subject in calcu- lus books is flawed for at least three reasons that I think are important. First, Newton’s Laws are used to derive a differential equation for the displacement vector from the Sun to a planet; say the Earth. Then it is shown that the displacement vector lies in a plane, and if the base point is translated to the origin, the endpoint traces out an ellipse. This is said to confirm Kepler’s first law, that the planets orbit the sun in an elliptical path, with the sun at one focus. However, the alert student may notice that the identical argument for the displacement vector in the opposite direction would show that the Sun orbits the Earth in an ellipse, which, it turns out, is very close to a circle with the Earth at the center. That would seem to provide aid and comfort to the Church’s rejection of Galileo’s claim that his heliocentric view had more validity than their geocentric one. Second, by placing the sun at the origin, the impression is given that either the sun is fixed, or else, that one may choose coordinates attached to a moving body, inertial or not. -
Fundamental Theorems in Mathematics
SOME FUNDAMENTAL THEOREMS IN MATHEMATICS OLIVER KNILL Abstract. An expository hitchhikers guide to some theorems in mathematics. Criteria for the current list of 243 theorems are whether the result can be formulated elegantly, whether it is beautiful or useful and whether it could serve as a guide [6] without leading to panic. The order is not a ranking but ordered along a time-line when things were writ- ten down. Since [556] stated “a mathematical theorem only becomes beautiful if presented as a crown jewel within a context" we try sometimes to give some context. Of course, any such list of theorems is a matter of personal preferences, taste and limitations. The num- ber of theorems is arbitrary, the initial obvious goal was 42 but that number got eventually surpassed as it is hard to stop, once started. As a compensation, there are 42 “tweetable" theorems with included proofs. More comments on the choice of the theorems is included in an epilogue. For literature on general mathematics, see [193, 189, 29, 235, 254, 619, 412, 138], for history [217, 625, 376, 73, 46, 208, 379, 365, 690, 113, 618, 79, 259, 341], for popular, beautiful or elegant things [12, 529, 201, 182, 17, 672, 673, 44, 204, 190, 245, 446, 616, 303, 201, 2, 127, 146, 128, 502, 261, 172]. For comprehensive overviews in large parts of math- ematics, [74, 165, 166, 51, 593] or predictions on developments [47]. For reflections about mathematics in general [145, 455, 45, 306, 439, 99, 561]. Encyclopedic source examples are [188, 705, 670, 102, 192, 152, 221, 191, 111, 635].