Recluse refuses to accept top award in mathematics
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.
