Grigori Perelman - Invisible genius
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman was born in Saint Petersburg (Russia) on 1966. His mathematical talent became apparent at the age of ten.
In 1982, he achieved a perfect score and won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) representing the Soviet Union team. In 1994, he proved the soul conjecture of Cheeger and Gromoll. But the Russian mathematician’s fame came especially after he solved the Poincaré Conjecture in 2002-2003. Since its formulation in 1904, Poincaré’s Conjecture had consumed a lot of “brain power” in mathematics.
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The solution caused a commotion in the scientific community. Perelman, though, refused to accept any awards for the Poincaré Conjecture solution, including the US$1 million offered by Clay Mathematics Institute to those who solved any of the seven “Millennium Problems”.
In 2006, a committee of nine mathematicians voted to award Perelman with a Fields Medal. Jonh Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, approached Perelman to persuade him to accept the prize. After 10 hours of attempted persuasion over two days, Ball gave up.
Perelman was not the first to decline the Fields Medal. He is part of a small group of scientists, including Alexander Grothendieck, who pleaded personal issues not to receive the highest award in the mathematics community. “’I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I’m not a hero of mathematics”, said Perelman.
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