NEW YORK, Aug 16: A Russian mathematician who solved the most difficult of mathematical problems and then disappeared without discussing his work is being sought by the community of scientists.

In an extensive report, the New York Times disclosed on Tuesday that three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, aka Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved an intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.

After posting a few short papers on the internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr Perelman disappeared into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right, the newspaper said.

Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose.

As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought, the Times said.