From the Guardian

Grigory Perelman, the maths genius who said no to $1m

Perelman cracks a century-old conundrum, refuses the reward, and barricades himself in his flat

Luke Harding
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 23 March 2010 19.45 GMT


You are the world's cleverest man. You have solved one of maths' most intractable problems. Do you a) accept a $1m reward, or b) reject the money, barricade yourself inside your flat and refuse to answer the door? The answer, if you are the reclusive Russian genius Grigory Perelman, is b).

The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week honoured Perelman for his solution to a problem posed almost a century ago by French mathematician Henri Poincaré. The theorem – known as Poincaré's conjecture – involves the deep structure of three-dimensional shapes. It is one of seven elusive challenges set by the institute, each carrying a $1m reward. It took the world's leading mathematicians several years to verify that Perelman had definitively solved the problem in a paper published in 2002.

Perelman, however, doesn't want the cash. This latest snub follows his refusal in 2006 to collect the maths equivalent of an Oscar, the Fields Medal. Perelman is currently jobless and lives with his mother and sister in a small flat in St Petersburg. (He has his own spartan one-bedroom flat, allegedly full of cockroaches, but rarely uses it.)

Perelman refuses to talk to the journalists camped outside his home. One who managed to reach him on his mobile was told: "You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms." The handful of neighbours who have seen him paint a picture of a scruffily dressed, unworldly eccentric. "He always wears the same tatty coat and trousers. He never cuts his nails or beard. When he walks he simply stares at the ground, rather than looking from side to side," one told a Moscow newspaper.

"He has rather strange moral principles. He feels tiny improper things very strongly," says Sergei Kisliakov, director of St Petersburg's Steklov Mathematics Institute, where the maths prodigy once worked as a researcher.

According to Kisliakov, Perelman quit the world of mathematics in disgust four years ago. His decision to spurn the Fields Medal may have been driven by a sense that his fellow mathematicians were not worthy to award it. "He severed all contact with the community, and wanted to find a job unrelated to maths," Kisliakov says. "I don't know whether he succeeded in that."

Perelman raises the term refusnik to a new level of purity.

Is it his right to withhold the gifts that God (or nature) had given him from his fellow humans?

That is a philosophical question that may be worth pondering.

he may but smart but he sure is a dumbass. I'll take the mil on his behalf gladly.

Sounds like he has the math skills of a god and social skills that are quite honestly weaker than an everyday pet's. Guess which is more important?

No one bites?

In communism, the idea was that we are all born naked. Everything that we have, we owe to the society. By ourselves, we have nothing. Okay, we may get things from our parents, but they also were born naked, i.e., the concept stays the same.

In accordance with that principle, personal freedom was always subordinated to our obligation towards society. Everyone was talking always about the greater good.

In our Western philosophy, we idolize individualism. We believe in the self-made man (and woman). Our selfishness and narcissism reach so far that many of us deny the existence of a greater good altogether. According to Ayn Rand: what is best for me is best for society.

As always, extremes are ugly, and this probably applies also in this case ... to both of the extremes. Yet, where is the golden center?

According to communism, Perelman is mentally ill, because he doesn't recognize his obligations towards society. Individualism is a form of mental disease. Consequently, Perelman belongs in a loony bin.

According to capitalism, Perelman is an idiot, because he prefers to live in a small apartment together with cockroaches, rather than accepting $1M that would be given to him free, no strings attached ... so maybe, we could call Perelman mentally ill also, because it takes a derailed mind to not succumb to the temptations of the golden calf?

Hooray for that guy. The world needs all the eccentrics it can get.

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

Originally Posted by Zichao

The world needs all the eccentrics it can get.

Without being eccentric, he most likely wouldn't be a genius. It takes a certain (and not too small) portion of eccentricity to be able to think outside the box, and you can't be a genius without that capacity.

As I recall, Perelman did not actually complete the Poincaré conjecture proof, but posted three unrefereed papers on arXiv.org, a collaborative site for scientists to report their findings. Other mathematicians rapidly fleshed out the bones of Perelman's argument and found that it stood up.

There has been a subsequent rash of activity. A google search of arXiv finds more than 2,000 papers that mention Perelman.

Quote:

he may but smart but he sure is a dumbass. I'll take the mil on his behalf gladly.

If he is living well in his mother's apartment in St Petersburg and has what he needs to conduct a satisfying life, the sudden arrival of a million US dollars would almost certainly cause him far more problems that it solves. He probably has no idea what he would do with it and it would lay him open to all sorts of extortion attempts. Russia is not a good country in which to become suddenly rich.

The other difficulty that he has is that, having laid out the framework for proving the Poincaré conjecture, the possibility is remote that he could ever achieve another such important result again. In that sense he might very well consider that his career as a mathematician is over - and he wants to be left alone to do something else.

English mathematician Andrew Wiles, who achieved a similar feat in 1994 in proving Fermat's Last Theorem, was knighted and was subsequently appointed to the Eugene Higgins Professor at Princeton, where he is currently Chair of the Mathematics Department. That is one possible path from international intellectual fame

I can understand Perelman's wish to have nothing to do with such elevation though. Neither would I.

Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber wrote a long feature in The New Yorker in August 2006 about how the proof finally emerged, and how Perelman felt the arguments about it.

Originally Posted by Francois Cellier

Is it his right to withhold the gifts that God (or nature) had given him from his fellow humans?

Yes. Coercion rarely works for productivity improvement. If he is not sensitive to money (the most common carrot in the world), use something else. Appeal to his intellectual vanity. If he feels his fellow mathematicians are unworthy to even judge/review his papers, challenge him to prove it.

If he is sexually shy (no proof of that - just gut instinct), ply him with women. Or orgies. Whatever.

Almost everyone has a weakness that can be exploited...

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

More prosaically, he probably is just a bit bonkers. There's no shortage of examples of the truism of genius being close to madness, and this is especially the case with math. It's history is littered with eccentrics, and many of those who were sane when they developed their magnum opus went mad later. Math is probably the least natural thing we can ever compel our little ape brains to do.