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I have recently finished a draft version of my blog book “Poincaré’s legacies: pages from year two of a mathematical blog“, which covers all the mathematical posts from my blog in 2008, excluding those posts which primarily originated from other authors or speakers.

The draft is much longer – 694 pages – than the analogous draft from 2007 (which was 374 pages using the same style files).  This is largely because of the two series of course lecture notes which dominate the book (and inspired its title), namely on ergodic theory and on the Poincaré conjecture.  I am talking with the AMS staff about the possibility of splitting the book into two volumes, one focusing on ergodic theory, number theory, and combinatorics, and the other focusing on geometry, topology, and PDE (though there will certainly be miscellaneous sections that will basically be divided arbitrarily amongst the two volumes).

The draft probably also needs an index, which I will attend to at some point before publication.

As in the previous book, those comments and corrections from readers which were of a substantive and mathematical nature have been acknowledged in the text.  In many cases, I was only able to refer to commenters by their internet handles; please email me if you wish to be attributed differently (or not to be attributed at all).

Any other suggestions, corrections, etc. are, of course welcome.

I learned some technical tricks for HTML to LaTeX conversion which made the process significantly faster than last year’s, although still rather tedious and time consuming; I thought I might share them below as they may be of use to anyone else contemplating a similar conversion.

In order to motivate the lengthy and detailed analysis of Ricci flow that will occupy the rest of this course, I will spend this lecture giving a high-level overview of Perelman’s Ricci flow-based proof of the Poincaré conjecture, and in particular how that conjecture is reduced to verifying a number of (highly non-trivial) facts about Ricci flow.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, here is the statement of that conjecture:

Theorem 1. (Poincaré conjecture) Let M be a compact 3-manifold which is simply connected (i.e. it is connected, and every loop is contractible to a point). Then M is homeomorphic to a 3-sphere $S^3$.

[Unless otherwise stated, all manifolds are assumed to be without boundary.]

I will take it for granted that this result is of interest, but you can read the Notices article of Milnor, the Bulletin article of Morgan, or the Clay Mathematical Institute description of the problem (also by Milnor) for background and motivation for this conjecture. Perelman’s methods also extend to establish further generalisations of the Poincaré conjecture, most notably Thurston’s geometrisation conjecture, but I will focus this course just on the Poincaré conjecture. (On the other hand, the geometrisation conjecture will be rather visibly lurking beneath the surface in the discussion of this lecture.)

On Friday, Yau concluded his lecture series by discussing the PDE approach to constructing geometric structures, particularly Einstein metrics, and their applications to many questions in low-dimensional topology (yes, this includes the Poincaré conjecture). Yau also discussed the situation in high-dimensional topology, which appears to be completely different (and much less well understood).

Yau’s slides for this talk are available here.