A Beautiful Mind, Part 2

This is about probably the breakthrough of this decade!

Just when you give up saying that, in all probability you cannot motivate yourself to blog again, something like this happens. A queer yet profound thing called Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman. Our definition of a reclusive genius.

I assumed after what happened, people would be lapping up news about our dear Grigori. Actually, not as many are. So, he is a Russian mathematician and what has he done? Oh nothing much, just solved one over-a-century-old problem in mathematics. He proved the Poincaré conjecture, posed in 1904 by Henry Poincaré (another insane polymath)  and regarded as one of the most important and difficult open problems in mathematics. The problem concerns the nature of three-dimensional space of finite extent and has eluded the best in business.

This is one of the seven million dollar Millennium Prize Problems posed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. No, literally, anyone who solves it will get a million dollars, no less. Even you and me. These seven were selected from numerous questions posed by great mathematicians. Some of them are centuries old. This was the first one to be solved! The problems, if proved, will be instrumental in numerous aspects.

Stunning, you may say. Now what? Again, nothing alarming, he has just rejected the prize! And as I said,  its easily the breakthrough of the decade. In fact, he is already notorious for such deeds. He rejected the Fields' Medal, bestowed upon him in 2006. The Fields' Medal is the equivalent to a Nobel (or an Oscar, for our more colorful readers). He probably regarded his contemporaries incompetent to award him the medal.

And guess what, he is currently jobless. Living with his mother and sister in St. Petersburg. He left mathematics, left as in totally left, before he got the Fields' Medal. Something about the lack of ethics among mathematicians or the like hurt him. You can only imagine the kind of functioning his mind has.

And guess what? He proved it in 2002. Now that you got used to his type, he did not publish it. Why would I publish the proof of one of most important problems and gain credit? Money? Thats for mortals. He posted it on the internet! As a part of a more elaborate research which he was doing. Word spread around and it took a better part of the decade for people to verify that he actually did it!

Of the lot many who tried, a reporter got hold of him. All he got was, “I am picking mushrooms, you are disturbing me”. Talk about dialogues!!

This is just a very small teaser, what I wrote. Dig up the net, you'll find lots more. Still reading about him and the seven questions and other related curiosities.

Expecting a movie on the lines of Beautiful Mind?