Millennium Prize déjà vu: Perelman solved Poincaré amid credit disputes, like OpenAI's Navier–Stokes now
keenanisalive · x · 2026-09-09
Responding to Geoffrey Irving's prediction that Navier–Stokes would be the next Millennium Prize problem solved, keenanisalive points out the first one — the Poincaré conjecture — was already solved by Grigori Perelman in 2002-2003, and that era saw a strikingly parallel credit controversy with another group claiming a complete proof.
- Irving admits he failed to predict the result would come wrapped in a bitter authorship dispute
- Background from the Clay Mathematics Institute: Perelman's proof, built on Hamilton's Ricci flow, also settled Thurston's geometrization conjecture; the prize was accepted in 2010
- The exchange frames the current OpenAI Navier–Stokes candidate-proof controversy in a longer historical arc
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