But while he won over his contemporaries, the written proof is so full of gaps and omissions that its logic is impossible to follow unless you have Freedman, or someone who learned the proof from him, standing over your shoulder guiding you. Nobody at the time believed it could possibly work - until Freedman personally persuaded some of the most respected people in the field. Freedman’s proof answered a question that at the time was one of the most important unsolved questions in mathematics, and the defining problem in Freedman’s field, topology.įreedman’s proof felt miraculous. The Disc Embedding Theorem rewrites a proof completed in 1981 by Michael Freedman - about an infinite network of discs - after years of solitary toil on the California coast. One of the most important pieces of mathematical knowledge was on the verge of being lost, maybe forever.
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