MADRID, Aug 22: A Russian recluse who solved a complex riddle won the mathematics world’s version of a Nobel prize on Tuesday, but true to form refused to accept the honour nor attend the royal awards ceremony.
Grigory Perelman, 40, was singled out for resolving Poincare’s Conjecture, which has perplexed mathematicians since it was coined by the Frenchman Henri Poincare in 1904.
But he was nowhere to be seen at the 25th annual International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, where Spain’s King Juan Carlos handed out the Fields Medals to other winners.
“I regret to inform you that Dr Perelman has declined to accept the medal,” said Sir John Ball, head of the International Mathematical Union hosting the congress.
Organisers did not expect Dr Perelman to turn up. His whereabouts are unknown and former colleagues say he has broken off contact with the outside world.
Other winners to receive Fields Medals, awarded every four years, from the Spanish king were Frenchman Wendelin Werner, 38, Australian analytical number theorist Terence Tao, 31, and the Russian Andrei Okunkov, 37.
The Poincare conjecture is regarded as one of the most important questions in topology, a geometry-related branch of mathematics which deals with spatial properties.
In simple layman’s terms, it asks if a spherical object is the only closed three-dimensional space without holes.
Or put in non-layman’s terms: “Every simply connected closed three-manifold without boundary is homeomorphic to a three-sphere.”
Three-sphere and three-manifold mean three-dimensional, while a manifold is an abstract mathematical space.
If he wants to, Dr Perelman can now pick up a one-million-dollar prize offered by the
Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
