Caring More About The Mathematics Than The Power

THIS is why Russians often make the best scientists and mathematicians!:

A reclusive Russian won the math's world's highest honour today for solving a problem that has stumped some of the discipline's greatest minds for a century - but he refused the award, effectively rejecting a million dollar prize that went with it.

Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St. Petersburg, won a Fields Medal - often described as the maths equivalent of the Nobel prize - for a breakthrough in topology that experts say might help scientists figure out the shape of the universe.

By shunning the award, colleagues said he had shown he had no interest in a separate US$1 million (£550,000) prize he is eligible for over his feat: apparently proving the Poincare conjecture, a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space that has been one of math's greatest puzzles for 100 years.

...Ball said later that he had met with Perelman in St. Petersburg in June, told him he had won a Fields medal and urged him to accept it. But Perelman said he felt isolated from the mathematics community and refused the medal because "he does not want to be seen as its figurehead," Ball said. He would not go into detail about why Perelman feels isolated.

Perelman's work is still under review, but no one has found any serious flaw in it, the maths union said in a statement.

...Mathematicians have been struggling with Poincare's conjecture since it was posed in 1904 by Jules Henri Poincare, a French polymath. The conjecture is a central question in topology, the study of the geometrical properties of objects that do not change when the they are stretched, distorted or shrunk.

It tackles the nature of three-dimensional space and it states that an object such as a pear or a banana is deformable into a sphere, whereas a bagel or American style doughnut with a hole in the middle is not. Proving the Poincare conjecture is anything but trivial. Colleagues say Perelman's work gives mathematical descriptions of what the universe might look like and promises exciting applications in physics and other fields.

..."It does not say what the shape (of the universe) is. It just says, 'look, these are the things it could be."'

Perelman is believed to live with his mother in St. Petersburg, but recent efforts to contact him proved fruitless.