Yesterday, Perelman put his second paper at the ArXiv. Implicitly, he is claiming to have proven the Geometrization conjecture modulo a result on collapsing which is independent of the Ricci flow. I haven't had time to try to read it yet, but I am hoping it might help me understand my conjectures about neck pinches in Ricci flow, explained in blog 3/4/03, maybe giving an alternative to Perelman's argument.
In the New York Times, there is an article
about whether the universe might be shaped like a donut, using new data
from WMAP. Apparently,
there are certain wave patterns that are suppressed that suggest
a certain special direction in the universe, which would
be along the holonomy of the donut, as described by Tegmark,
de Oliveira-Costa, and Hamilton. But the search for circles in the
sky, as described in blog
3/3/03 has not been finished yet.