The telescope conjecture gave mathematicians a handle on ways to map one sphere to another. Now that it has been disproved, the universe of shapes has exploded. The post An Old Conjecture Falls, Making Spheres a Lot More Complicated first appeared on Quanta Magazine
In early June, buzz built as mathematicians landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. Their destination was the University of Oxford and a conference in honor of the 65th birthday of Michael Hopkins, a mathematician at Harvard University who’d served as a mentor to many of the attendees. Hopkins made a name for himself in the late 1980s for work on seven conjectures that Doug Ravenel of the University…