Recluse refuses to accept top award in mathematics

A RECLUSIVE Russian yesterday refused to accept the maths world’s highest honour for solving a problem that has stumped some of the discipline’s greatest minds for a century.

Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St Petersburg, won a Fields Medal — often described as the maths equivalent of the Nobel prize — for a breakthrough in the study of shapes that experts say might help scientists figure out the shape of the universe.

Besides shunning the award for his work in topology, Dr Perelman also seems uninterested in a separate $1 million prize he could win for proving the Poincare conjecture, a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space.

The award, given out every four years, was announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Three other mathematicians — Russian Andrei Okounkov, Frenchman Wendelin Werner and Australian Terence Tao — won Fields medals in other areas of mathematics.

They received their awards from King Juan Carlos of Spain to loud applause from delegates to the conference. But Dr Perelman was not present.

“I regret that Dr Perelman has declined to accept the medal,” said John Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, which is holding the convention.

Dr Perelman said he felt isolated from the mathematics community and refused the medal because “he does not want to be seen as its figurehead,” Mr Ball said, without offering further details.

Dr Perelman’s work is still under review, but no one has found any serious flaw.

The Fields medal was founded in 1936 and named after Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields. It comes with a $13,400 stipend. Dr Perelman is eligible for far more money from a private foundation called The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

In 2000, the institute announced bounties for seven historic, unsolved math problems, including the Poincare conjecture.

If his proof stands the test of time, Dr Perelman will win all or part of the $1m prize money. That prize should be announced in about two years. The Poincare conjecture essentially says that in three dimensions you cannot transform a doughnut shape into a sphere without ripping it.