Not interested in fame, money and recognition
Russian maths genius Grigory Perelman, who declined a prestigious international award four years ago, is under new pressure to accept a prize.
A US institute wants to give him $1m (£700,000) for solving one of the world's most complex mathematical problems, the Poincare Conjecture.
But it is unclear whether Dr Perelman, a virtual recluse, will pick it up.
A children's charity in St Petersburg, where he lives, has urged him to take the money and give it to charity.
Dr Perelman, 43, has cut himself off from the outside world for the past four years, living with his elderly mother in a tiny flat said by neighbours to be infested with cockroaches.
In an open letter on its website, the Warm Home charity called on Dr Perelman to give the cash equivalent of the US Clay Mathematics Institute's $1m Millennium Prize to Russian charities.
It suggested that the mathematician had already made an ethical point by turning down the Fields Medal, the world's highest prize in mathematics, in 2006.
Appeal for privacy
The mathematician is reported to have said "I have all I want" when contacted by a reporter this week about the Clay Millennium Prize.
Grigory Perelman at a maths lecture in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1980
Grigory Perelman already won maths accolades as a teenager
According to the UK's Daily Mail newspaper, he was speaking through the closed door of his flat.
Dr Perelman was the first person to turn down the Fields Medal, which would have been presented to him at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.
"I'm not interested in money or fame," he is quoted to have said at the time.
"I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I'm not a hero of mathematics. I'm not even that successful; that is why I don't want to have everybody looking at me."
One of Russia's most senior politicians, Federation Council Chairman Sergei Mironov, has appealed for Dr Perelman to be left in peace to make up his own mind.
He suggested that it was "not very decent to look into other people's pockets and count other people's money", Russia's Interfax news agency reports.
Just eat the blinkin' doughnut!
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Beauty lies in the eyes of the beerholder.
Good old "Mathsputin"... A genious who doesn't fit into this world of mere mortals..
imagine earth being a doughnut...
lincoln solved it in 3seconds mathboy :)
rishimba, it wasn't funny, it was fun and educational eh?
...listen to the sound of silence....
i learnt something funny....every object can be blown up either into a sphere or a doughnut.
It should go to LincolnPirate. He solved the problem in a second!
Rishimba... maybe because an apple or a ball is hard compared to a doughnut :)
... i tried to understand but...:(
Depends with the flavor lincoln :)
mathboy and WK, he doesnt need the award coz you're both there to recieve it lol
...listen to the sound of silence....
If you eat the doughnut the problem is solved.
you are right marie..its simple..lol
but the mathematical proof of this may be complicated..
Money is very hard to resist too.. This guy is rather poor.
Leave him alone if he wants. I can resist money but fame will seduce me everytime :P
(sigh...) i still didn't understand it fully. Just that a doughnut will break if a tie stretched around it will shrink :)
He's a genius ...
...listen to the sound of silence....
thanks mathboy...i think i understand now but not sure thought ..lol
rishimba, I don't know much about it though.
See this clip. Simon Pampena explained it very well.
"If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the surface of the apple is "simply connected," but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin)."
Source: Clay Mathematics Institute
mathboy, can you please explain in simple layman's language, what is Poincare Conjecture..
i tried to google and read the stuff but cant understand much.
Good for him. They should leave him alone.
If it isn't religion trying tell individuals what to do it's no good so called charities.
(plus of course the reactionary south Asians on QL....)