What is so great about the proof of the Poincaré conjecture?

Jordan Ellenberg has a truly wonderful article in Slate.

The entities we study in science fall into two categories: those which can be classified in a way a human can understand, and those which are unclassifiably wild. Numbers are in the first class—you would agree that although you cannot list all the whole numbers, you have [...]

Intriguing enchantment from a soap bubble with a handle …

I am sure you all want to know what a ‘genus one helicoid’ is. Apparently, it’s the new, new thing in minimal surfaces.

The article mentions some of the applications of minimal surfaces in mixtures of polymers and architecture too; the latter might exploit, for example, the physical ruggedness of the minimal surfaces. However, the next [...]