The idea is to fill Facebook with math, surprising friends with its little-known beauty, which augments art, poetry, etc. Whoever likes this post will receive a mathematician's name, and will have to write a short introduction about them, and explain in layman terms a mathematical work (theorem, idea, book, field of math, anything important or interesting) by them. Include this text, but you may modify it for the sake of public math awareness.
He proved that:
- Throw a world map on the floor. There's always a way to hammer a nail through the map and the floor so that the nail's position on the map exactly corresponds to its actual location.
- Take a piece of paper, fold a paper airplane and press it flat within the original boundary of the paper. One of the points in the paper has been returned to its original position.
This is one of many "fixed-point theorems", all of which say that if you take a "world", transform it so-and-so, then some point in the world must have remained immobile. The more famous Brouwer fixed-point theorem has been applied in Economics, to show that markets (the "world") have "fixed points" (e.g. balances between supply and demand).
I must thank a friend for telling me a basic form of this layman explanation many years ago; it has stuck with me all these years.