http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/08/23/012.html
Wednesday, August 23, 2006. Issue 3481. Page 3.
Mathematician Turns Down Top Award
By Daniel Woolls
The Associated Press
AP
Perelman in an undated photograph
MADRID -- A reclusive Russian mathematician won the world's highest honor in
the field Tuesday for work toward solving one of history's toughest math
problems but he refused to accept the award -- a stunning renunciation of
accolades from the top minds in his field.
Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St. Petersburg, was praised for work
in the field known as topology, which studies shapes, and for a breakthrough
that might help scientists figure out nothing less than the shape of the
universe.
But besides shunning the medal, academic colleagues say he also seems
uninterested in a separate, $1 million prize he might be due over his feat:
proving a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space that has stumped
very smart people for 100 years.
The academic award, called a Fields Medal, was announced at the International
Congress of Mathematicians, an event held every four years, this time in Madrid
from Aug. 22-30. It is the highest honor in the field of math. Three other
mathematicians -- another Russian, a Frenchman and an Australian -- also won
Fields honors this year.
They received their awards from Spanish King Juan Carlos to loud applause from
delegates to the conference. But 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.
Perelman's work is still under review, but no one has found any serious flaw in
it, the union said in a statement.
Ball later said he did not interpret Perelman's decision to shun the medal as
an insult to the world's top math brains. "I am sure he did not mean it that
way. He has his reasons," Ball said, without saying what they might be.
The $1 million prize will be decided in about two years by a private foundation
called The Clay Mathematics Institute, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
after other academics have analyzed Perelman's work.
If his proof stands the test of time, Perelman will win all or part of the
prize money. In 2000, the institute announced bounties for seven unresolved,
historic math problems, including the one Perelman tackled. Two weeks ago,
academics began analyzing Perelman's work, which draws heavily from a technique
developed by another mathematician, Richard Hamilton of Columbia University.
The institute said it could be conceivable that they share the money.
The riddle Perelman tackled is called the Poincare conjecture, which
essentially says that in three dimensions you cannot transform a doughnut shape
into a sphere without ripping it, although any shape without a hole can be
stretched or shrunk into a sphere.
Perelman is believed to live with his mother in St. Petersburg, but recent
efforts to contact him proved fruitless.
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