Mathematics

A year of ups and downs for mathematics, 1994 began with the awareness of a serious gap in Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem. In June 1993 Wiles, a Princeton University mathematician, had claimed a proof, by relating the problem to a deep conjecture in algebraic number theory, of Pierre de Fermat's famous 350-year-old assertion that xn + yn = zn has no solutions for which x, y, and z are whole numbers if n is three or more. The gap emerged in late 1993 in a review of the proof and lingered until October 1994, when Wiles sent colleagues a revised proof that he hoped would finally lay the problem to rest. At year's end the jury remained out on the validity of the new proof. (see also Index: analysis, atom, geometry)

More encouraging news was the solution, by Krystyna Kuperberg of Auburn (Ala.) University, of the Seifert conjecture, a problem about the topology of dynamic systems. According to the celebrated hairy ball theorem, it is impossible to comb a hairy ball smoothly; somewhere at least one hair must stand up on end. The theorem is one of dynamics because such an arrangement of "hairs" is a description of the way the states of a system, represented by points on the sphere, change with time, or flow along the directions of the hairs. The hairy ball theorem was proved long ago, but its higher-dimensional cousins have been more elusive. The most notorious is a question asked in 1950 by Herbert Seifert of the University of Heidelberg, Germany, about a three-dimensional analogue of the surface of a sphere--a kind of curved space called a 3-sphere. If one defines a "flow" by filling the 3-sphere with curved lines that fit smoothly together like the flow lines of a fluid, most of the flow lines will wander around in a complicated way. Occasionally, however, one of them may close up into a loop. It is easy to find a flow with only two closed loops but, as Seifert asked, can one be found with no closed loops at all?

Kuperberg's surprising answer is "yes." All earlier approaches to the problem had used the same basic idea, that of inserting a "plug" into a given flow to change it and eradicate a selected closed loop. The plug is a small region of flow lines in which some of the lines that enter the region never exit but get trapped inside. Specifically, one starts with a known flow that has only two closed loops and then removes them both by inserting two plugs that trap the lines of the loops and render them no longer closed. The central difficulty is to ensure that no new loops are created inside the plugs themselves. Kuperberg succeeded with a seemingly outrageous idea; she made each plug "eat its own tail" like a snake so that closed loops get trapped in a kind of infinite regress. The solution is a geometric gem, and it changes forever mathematicians' most basic ideas about dynamics in three dimensions.

On the borderline with mathematical physics but clearly on the mathematical side came a fundamental breakthrough in the quantum mechanics of many-particle systems. According to quantum mechanics, the electrons of an atom can occupy only a discrete sequence of energy levels. In particular, there is a minimum energy level, the ground state, below which an atom cannot go. In effect, the ground state is a barrier that prevents atoms from evaporating. In 1981 the U.S. physicist Julian Schwinger (see OBITUARIES) devised an accurate approximation for the way in which the ground-state energy of an atom varies with atomic charge; i.e., with the number of protons in the nucleus. His conjectured formula for the ground-state energy of an atom having charge Z is approximately -aZ7/3+ 1/8 Z2-bZ5/3, in which a and b are particular constants. In the past year Schwinger's conjecture was given a rigorous proof by Charles Fefferman of Princeton University and L.A. Seco of the University of Toronto. Their achievement represented an important step toward a more nearly complete understanding of the way in which chemistry derives from the laws of quantum mechanics. The next step would be to extend the work from atoms to molecules.

New mathematics does not have to be complicated and technical; it can also be based on very simple ideas. Near the end of the year, Charles Radin of the University of Texas at Austin published a very strange tiling of the plane: a finite set of tiles that can be assembled only in a highly complex way. Most simple tilings are periodic, repeating the same basic unit over again at regular intervals. In 1961, while investigating questions about decidability in mathematical logic, the philosopher Hao Wang introduced the idea of aperiodic tiles, which can cover the plane but not in any periodic way. Radin's tiles, which are based on an idea of John Horton Conway of Princeton, are aperiodic. In fact--and this is the great novelty--the tiles must appear in infinitely many orientations. Lying at the heart of this exotic tiling is a simple right triangle, formed from a domino cut in half along a diagonal. (IAN STEWART)

This article updates the Macropædia articles ANALYSIS; ATOMS; GEOMETRY; NUMBER THEORY.

Events of 1996 Events of 1995 Events of 1993

Copyright © 1994-1997 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

To cite this page: "Book of the Year (1995): Mathematics" Britannica Online.