. They 4 EFTA00586678 were mistaken. The conjecture went through good topologists the way Marciano went through heavyweights. First to fall was Papakyriakopoulos himself, who had pursued the conjecture with monomaniacal dedication, refusing to teach classes, for notable instance -- which meant rejecting a te

") In 1963 his wife, also a mathematician, suggested that if it was attention he craved, he should get out of knots and into Poincare. Having seen Papakyriakopoulos's work, Haken figured the conjecture "should be immediately possible to prove." Poenaru, his rival, defected from Rumania in 1962 while attending a