It appears that
topologist Martin Dunwoody has proposed a general
proof for the Poincare Conjecture. As of April 7, 2002, this proof is in
preprint, available for now at http://www.maths.soton.ac.uk/~mjd/Poin.pdf.
As I am not a
mathematician, I will not attempt to provide a layman's explanation of the conjecture. It is worth noting that if the proof stands, Dr. Dunwoody may be a very wealthy man - the Clay Institute prize is
one million dollars!