RUSSIA: A Russian mathematician has turned his nose up at a $1 million (€800,000) prize for solving one of the most complex problems in modern mathematics. Nor will he accept an international mathematics award for his work on solving the notorious Poincaré Conjecture.
There is speculation that Grigori Perelman has rejected international recognition for his mathematical breakthrough because of perceived mistreatment by fellow intellectuals.
Whatever the 40-year-old's view, he has ignored attempts to coax him to accept the Fields Medal prize, viewed as the Nobel prize of mathematics and a huge international distinction.
John Ball, chair of the Fields Medal Committee, said he spent two fruitless days in St Petersburg trying to convince Perelman to accept the award. Ball said his refusal "centred on his feelings of isolation from the mathematical community".
"Consequently he doesn't want to be a figurehead of that community. He obviously has a different kind of psychology to other people," he said.
The reasons for Perelman's refusal remain unclear, though press reports say he was hurt at not being re-elected a member of St Petersburg's Steklov Mathematical Institute last December.
The Poincaré Conjecture is so difficult the US Clay Mathematics Institute named it as one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems in 2000, offering a $1 million bounty to anyone who could solve one of the problems.
Perelman is the only person to have solved any of the millennium problems and his theory is on the verge of being verified as three teams come to the end of years of checks, Ball said.
In mathematics, the Poincaré Conjecture is a topological conundrum about the characterisation of a three-dimensional sphere set on a three-dimensional space or "3-manifold". After nearly a century of efforts, a series of papers by Perelman, following the programme of Richard Hamilton, produced an outline for a solution. Following Perelman's work, several groups of mathematicians have produced works filling in the details for the full proof, though review by the mathematics community is ongoing.
"It is a fantastic achievement, the most deserving of all of us here, in my opinion," Fields Medal winner Terence Tao said yesterday.
Additional reporting, Reuters