[Rictor]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/maths-genius-living-in-poverty/2006/08/20/1156012411120.html

A MATHS genius who won fame last week for apparently spurning a million-dollar prize is living with his mother in a humble flat in St Petersburg, co-existing on her $74-a-month pension, because he has been unemployed since December.

Grigory "Grisha" Perelman stunned the maths world when he revealed in 2002 his solution to a century-old puzzle known as the Poincare Conjecture.

But friends say he cannot afford to travel to the International Mathematics Union's convention in Madrid, where his peers want him to receive the maths equivalent of the Nobel Prize tomorrow, but is too modest to ask anyone to underwrite his trip.

Honestly, this guy's a hero. I don't even know anything about math, but I think maybe 0.1% of people would have the moral discipline and humility to turn down a million well-deserved bucks, just because.

edit: for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman

also, I'm interested to get CP's take on this, from the mathematical perspetive. Is it as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be?

[aldo_14]

**** - Tell him to take the money and give it to me, then.

[Colonol Dekker]

Anyone too proud to accept funds to travel, In order to pick a $1000,000 deserves to be chemically sterilised, Genius or not...........


(dont take m random ramblings to be e-rage, It just amazes me how some genius lack the most basic common sense)

[Rictor]

Ever considered that he's smart enough to place no value on money? The sensation that his (alleged) turning-down of the prize has created in the media only goes to show people's priorities, and how far from his way of thinking we all are. I would say the moral character he has shown is as rare as his math ability.

edit: also, is it just me, or do Russian Jews account for a disproportionate number of genuis types, especially in math, physics, chess and so on? Maybe it's something in the matzah.

[Colonol Dekker]

I see where you're coming from on that, but if he has a higher moral grounding, He would take the million, and give his mother a higher quality of life than a 74$ pension.....

[Rictor]

Actually, I heard him say something to the effect "I'll decide whether to accept it (the prize) when it's offered". Also, I wouldn't put absolute faith in the $74/month figure, the media isn't known for it's stellar fact-checking ability. But if you believe that money corrupts, the same applies equally to others as to yourself. So to create all sorts of problems for himself and his mother, both extrenal and internal, by taking the money would be immoral in that light.

While everyone, myslef included, is quick to assign philosophical motivations for this, it probably something more mundane and vague, like simple shyness or some internal dilemna to which the world is not privy.

[aldo_14]

Well, really, you only really need as much money as it takes for you to be happy.......

[Mefustae]

Well, really, you only really need as much money as it takes for you to be happy.......

Gimme a few mil and i'll be plenty happy.

[Colonol Dekker]

Well, really, you only really need as much money as it takes for you to be happy.......

Gimme a few mil and i'll be plenty happy.

Just one, 2K a week interest wold suit me

[CP5670]

This is somewhat old news. Perelman actually turned the award down as a protest though. Find some newer articles on this. Apparently he has fallen out with the mathematical community in general, although they don't go into details.

As for the Poincare conjecture itself, it's a statement in topology that basically says that any simply connected (having no holes in it), closed (containing its boundary, roughly speaking) 3-manifold (a set locally like normal 3D space) can be continuously deformed into a 3-sphere (i.e. a sphere-like shell existing in 4D space). The goal is to prove or disprove this. I'm not sure what makes this question so important (it's not quite in my area), but it's regarded as one of the two or three foremost problems in math today.

I guess the main unsolved problem still left in math now is the Riemann Hypothesis, the one I'm most interested in.

[Colonol Dekker]

The answer is 2 to the power of 6 over its root squared...........

[Goober5000]

As for the Poincare conjecture itself, it's a statement in topology that basically says that any simply connected (having no holes in it), closed (containing its boundary, roughly speaking) 3-manifold (a set locally like normal 3D space) can be continuously deformed into a 3-sphere (i.e. a sphere-like shell existing in 4D space). The goal is to prove or disprove this.

Well, when you put it like that, it seems self-evident, doesn't it?  (I realize that sounds a lot like a joke, but it's not. )  After all, can't you morph any three-dimensional object without holes into a sphere?

[Mars]

And I thought precal was confusing

[aldo_14]

As for the Poincare conjecture itself, it's a statement in topology that basically says that any simply connected (having no holes in it), closed (containing its boundary, roughly speaking) 3-manifold (a set locally like normal 3D space) can be continuously deformed into a 3-sphere (i.e. a sphere-like shell existing in 4D space). The goal is to prove or disprove this.

Well, when you put it like that, it seems self-evident, doesn't it?  (I realize that sounds a lot like a joke, but it's not. )  After all, can't you morph any three-dimensional object without holes into a sphere?

Prove it.

[CP5670]

As for the Poincare conjecture itself, it's a statement in topology that basically says that any simply connected (having no holes in it), closed (containing its boundary, roughly speaking) 3-manifold (a set locally like normal 3D space) can be continuously deformed into a 3-sphere (i.e. a sphere-like shell existing in 4D space). The goal is to prove or disprove this.

Well, when you put it like that, it seems self-evident, doesn't it?  (I realize that sounds a lot like a joke, but it's not. )  After all, can't you morph any three-dimensional object without holes into a sphere?

Actually, a normal sphere is considered two dimensional in the topological sense. But you're right, this does look fairly obvious at first glance. The one and two dimensional versions of it (that an unbroken curve or a sheet with no holes can be respectively turned into a circle or a sphere) were shown long ago and it was also proved for dimensions higher than 3 in the 60s. I don't know much more about this, but the 3D case is apparently much harder to establish for some reason.

There are actually a lot of seemingly obvious results in math that took a lot of work to prove (the Jordan curve theorem is a good example), although I think in this case it's just the imprecise way I had phrased it.

[WMCoolmon]

On the subject of the prize, I dispute the idea that turning down a lot of money is a sign of morality. It's what you do with it that counts.

[karajorma]

Agreed. You could always accept the money and donate it to charity so turning down money without knowing where it will go isn't morality at all as far as I'm concerned.

[Colonol Dekker]

I would keep half, live on two grand a week interest, and dontate the rest to The Royal British Legion....
http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/