Cobordism hypothesis

Okay kiddo, let's try to talk about the cobordism hypothesis in a way that you can understand it.

First off, do you know what a "hypothesis" is? It's kind of like a guess or an idea that hasn't been proven yet, but people think it might be true. Scientists and mathematicians use hypotheses to try and figure out how things work.

Now, let's talk about "cobordism". This is a big word that basically means "ways that shapes can be connected to each other". Imagine you have a square shape and a circle shape. They're different, right? But what if you could connect them together in some way so that they became more similar? That's what cobordism is all about - finding ways to connect shapes together.

The cobordism hypothesis is a big idea that mathematicians are trying to prove. It says that there are certain ways of connecting shapes together that are more special than others. These special ways of connecting are called "cobordisms", and they can tell us a lot about the shapes we're working with.

For example, suppose you have two shapes - a square and a circle - and you want to figure out if there's a way to connect them in a special way. The cobordism hypothesis says that if you can find a special connection between them (called a "cobordism"), then you can learn something important about both shapes. Maybe you can figure out how big they are, or what their properties are.

So, in summary, the cobordism hypothesis is a big idea in mathematics that says there are special ways to connect shapes together (called "cobordisms") that can help us learn more about those shapes. It's a hypothesis because we're still trying to prove that the idea is true, but lots of mathematicians think it might be.