Talk:Simon Donaldson

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Untitled[edit]

I'm coming back to say more about Donaldson's work, unless anyone does so before me. One interesting aspect is the use of ideas that arose in physics to prove results in geometry. Billlion 15:22, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

sources[edit]

Move to Imperial in 1999 see [1] my understanding was that he was on sabatical at Stanford for a year, as was his wife Nora Donaldson, a statistician, perhaps slightly contrary to what it says in this 2000 Encyclopædia Britannica article. Interestingly Bristol University announced prematurely that he was comming there. Billlion 16:39, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I found a source saying he was at Stanford Billlion (talk) 20:47, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Rn[edit]

Thanks to Jitse Niesen for the corrections, but I dont like the change of blackboard bold R to bold R. The correct mathematical symbol, which is certainly universally accepted with in the geometry and analysis communities is

\mathbb {R} ^{n}

The problem is that in some browsers TeX formulas come out too big, so I displayed it, which is probably wrong. I think we have a choice of making things look right in some current browsers, but when mathml is working properly in wiki, we will have to go back and render them correctly. Suggestions please? Billlion 21:02, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

My reason for not using blackboard bold is that it does not look nice, whether it is used in the running text or not. The practice of using blackboard bold for the set of reals is common but not universal. I just checked five books on my shelf: three use

\mathbb {R}

(blackboard bold), one uses R (normal bold) and one uses R (some slanted font). -- Jitse Niesen 23:43, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

This is a well known controversy: to use blackboard bold off the blackboard and in print, or not. --C S (Talk) 18:33, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

citing sources[edit]

Would the people who created/edited this article please add source citations for the biographical info mentioned in the article, as per WP:CITE and WP:BLP? Thanks, Nsk92 18:25, 13 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently incorrect assertion about higher-dimensional h-cobordisms[edit]

The second bullet item under Donaldson's work is this:

"A smooth h-cobordism between 4-manifolds need not be trivial (Donaldson 1987b). This contrasts with the situation in higher dimensions."

But a smooth h-cobordism in between n-manifolds for n ≥ 5 need not be trivial, either: this is the subject of the s-cobordism theorem.

I hope someone familiar with Donaldson's work will fix this. (I suspect the word "simply-connected" was omitted.)Daqu (talk) 05:54, 5 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that was the missing hypothesis. Donaldson produced many counter-examples that are simply connected. Thanks for catching this. The change has been implemented. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.21.240.80 (talk) 04:09, 14 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]