Genius hides, far from maths crowd

Grigory Perelman

MADRID - The maths world's biggest celebrity shunned its most prestigious prize yesterday, apparently bitter at his perceived mistreatment by fellow intellectuals.

Russian Grigory Perelman remained in his St Petersburg flat while the greatest maths minds met in Madrid for the International Mathematical Union's four-yearly congress.

The 40-year-old recluse had been due to receive a Fields Medal, known as the "Nobel Prize" of maths, after solving the Poincare Conjecture - a quandary on the properties of spheres that has bedevilled mathematicians for more than a century.

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.

John Ball, chairman of the Fields Medal Committee, said he spent two fruitless days in St Petersburg trying to convince Perelman to accept the award.

Ball said the 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 Sunday Telegraph reported that Perelman was unemployed and living with his mother on her pension in her humble St Petersburg flat.

The Poincare Conjecture is so difficult the United States Clay Mathematics Institute named it as one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems in 2000 and pledged a US$1 million ($1.58 million) bounty to anyone who could solve one.

The Poincare Conjecture was first posed by French mathematician Jules Henri Poincare in 1904 and seeks to understand the shape of the universe by linking shapes, spaces and surfaces.

"They are like these huge cliff walls, with no obvious hand holds. I have no idea how to get to the top," said Terence Tao, who won a Fields Medal with Perelman and two other mathematicians.

Having finally solved the problem after more than 10 years' work, Perelman simply posted his conclusion on the internet, rather than publishing his explanation in a recognised journal.

Perelman was the only person to have solved any of the Millennium Problems and his theory was on the verge of being verified as three teams came to the end of years of checks, Ball said.

Whether he will accept the US$1 million prize from the Clay institute is open to question, but Tao is in no doubt both prizes are deserved.

"It is a fantastic achievement, the most deserving of all of us here in my opinion," said the 30-year-old Australian.

Tao, 31, was in elevated company with Frenchman Wendelin Werner and Russian Andrei Okunkov.

Tao, Adelaide-born but based at the University of California, Los Angeles, was lauded for contributions to harmonic analysis and numerical theory.

He earned his PhD from Princeton University at 21 and was full professor of mathematics at UCLA at 24.

- REUTERS