Braiding with Kim

In 2002 a reclusive Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman quietly posted a paper online. No press release. No announcement. He just uploaded it to a free academic archive and went back to his life.

What he had posted was the solution to the Poincaré conjecture, a mathematical problem that had defeated every mathematician on earth for exactly 100 years. It was one of seven problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute as the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. A $1 million prize had been offered to anyone who could crack any one of them. Nobody had.

Perelman had solved it alone, working in near total isolation.

The global mathematics community took three years to fully verify his proof. When they did the reaction was unlike anything the field had seen. Science magazine named it the scientific breakthrough of the year in 2006, the first time that honor had ever gone to a mathematics result.

They awarded him the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics. He refused it. The president of the International Mathematical Union flew to Saint Petersburg and spent an entire day trying to convince him to accept. Perelman said no and closed the door.

In 2010 the Clay Mathematics Institute awarded him the $1 million Millennium Prize. He refused that too. He said the prize was unjust because it failed to acknowledge the equal contribution of another mathematician named Richard Hamilton whose earlier work had made his proof possible.

When a reporter asked him why he turned down a million dollars he said "I know how to control the universe. Tell me, why would I need to chase a million dollars?"

He had already quit mathematics by then. He resigned his position at the Steklov Institute in 2005, walked away from the field entirely and moved into a small apartment in a Saint Petersburg suburb with his elderly mother. He grows mushrooms. He plays violin. He has given no interviews since 2006.

The $1 million he refused was used to fund a scholarship for young mathematicians.