Fields Prize Rejected

Unusual, yet sensible is what a Russian scientist has to say
to clarify reasons for renouncing this year’s fields prize,
a version of the Nobel Prize, at the International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Madrid,the day before.

Grigory Perelman, a brilliant Russian mathematician who solved a key piece in a century-old puzzle known as the Poincaré conjecture, was one of four mathematicians awarded the Fields Medal. But with the previous honors, Dr. Perelman refused to accept this one, and he did not attend the ceremonies at the Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid,which might have put the whole world at its feet.

The other members were keen enough to collect their medal at this ceremony.The other Fields medalists this year are Andrei Okounkov, a professor of mathematics at Princeton; Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles; and Wendelin Werner, a professor of mathematics at the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France. Dr. Perelman, 40, is known not only for his work on the Poincaré conjecture, among the most heralded unsolved math problems, but also because he has declined previous mathematical prizes and has spurned offers from Princeton, Stanford and other universities. He has shown no interest in pursuing the $1 million that the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., is offering for the first published proof of the conjecture.

Not many times in life one gets a chance to win something very close to nobel prize. But one needs a heart of gold to trust on one’s priorities and decide accordingly to disown a fields medal.It is thought that Perelman refused this award, because he dislikes self promotion,in a world where every other man is oozing with greed of popularity and of course money.

Little is known about Perelman, who refuses to talk to the media. He was born on June 13, 1966 and his prodigious talent led to his early enrolment at St. Petersburg school specializing in advanced mathematics and physics. At the age of 16, he won a gold medal with a perfect score at the 1982 International Mathematical Olympiad, a competition for gifted schoolchildren.

After receiving his Ph.D from the St. Petersburg State University, he worked at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics before moving to the U.S. in the late 80s to take posts at various universities. He returned to Steklov about 10 years ago to work on his proof of the universe’s shape.

The problem Perelman solved concerns the geometry of multidimensional spaces and is key to the field of topology. He claims to have solved a more general version of the problem called Thurston’s geometrization conjecture, of which the Poincaré conjecture is a special case.
It’s a central problem both in math and physics because it seeks to understand what the shape of the universe can be.

so, lets salute this noble living being, who is so simple at heart and still so vibrant about his technicalities.