Well this kind of cracks me up. Call it irony or what-have-ya, but NASA apparently can figure out how to collect an array of data from space to help define who we are on earth but can't figure out how to get a parachute to open...
In the words of my future husband, CNN Anchor and Space Correspondent, Miles O'Brien "It hit without a chute opening!!! A total loss." - blog
Something that might be a tad more interesting is the discovery (first published in May of 2003) of the solution of n=3. By "modifying Richard Hamilton's program for geometrization through Ricci Flow" Grisha Perelman, a recluses Russian, is expected to have proven Poincare conjecture.
The Poincaré conjecture as given above is equivalent to the case n=3. The difficulty of low-dimensional topology is highlighted by the fact that these analogues have now all been proven (with dimension n=4 being the hardest one by far), while the original 3-dimensional version of Poincaré's conjecture remains unsolved. The case n=1 is easy and the case n=2 has long been known. Stephen Smale solved the cases n≥7 in 1960 and subsequently extended his proof to n≥5; he received a Fields Medal for his work in 1966. Michael Freedman solved n = 4 in 1982 and received a Fields medal in 1986. - Article
"Every closed n-manifold which is homotopy equivalent to the n-sphere is homeomorphic to the n-sphere."
Formally, a homotopy between two continuous functions f and g from a topological space X to a topological space Y is defined to be a continuous function H : X × [0,1] → Y from the product of the space X with the unit interval [0,1] to Y such that, for all points x in X, H(x,0)=f(x) and H(x,1)=g(x).If we think of the second parameter of H as "time", then H describes a "continuous deformation" of f into g: at time 0 we have the function f, at time 1 we have the function g. - More
Math defining space is so exciting!
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