True Pynchon character

[Ya Sam]

Maverick genius turns down maths 'Nobel'

James Randerson, Science Correspondent
Tuesday August 22, 2006
Guardian Unlimited


In a major snub to the international maths community, one of the winners of 
the discipline's most coveted prize has refused the award.
The enigmatic and reclusive mathematician Grigory "Grisha" Perelman has 
turned down a Fields medal - an award many consider the Nobel Prize of 
maths.

The Russian genius shocked academics in 2002 with his claim to have solved 
the Poincaré conjecture. The problem, which has stumped the best 
mathematical minds for a century, relates to the possible shapes the 
universe can take.

[...]

He has already publicly refused a $1m (£520,000) prize offered by a private 
maths research institute in the US if his proof turns out to be correct.

"He's totally focused on mathematics," said Prof Jaffe. "He does not worry 
at this stage of his life about personal things like wealth and position. 
But he carries it to an extreme which people might describe as a little 
crazy"

The maths world was set abuzz in 2002 by the first instalment of Dr 
Perelman's groundbreaking work on the Poincaré conjecture, a problem set out 
by the French mathematician, physicist and philosopher Jules Henri Poincaré 
in 1904.

The celebrated problem concerns the geometry of multidimensional spaces and 
is key to the field of topology, the branch of maths that deals with shapes.

full text here

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1855723,00.html

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