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Maths magician turns down Fields Medal
Geetanjali Gayatri
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 23
Over a century-old puzzle of the Poincare Conjecture stands solved and the genius behind it - Russian mathematician Dr Grigori Perelman - wants no accolades, no awards and no recognition for this achievement, which has brought with it the prestigious Fields Medal, an analogue of the Nobel Prize in the field of Mathematics.

His only wish is to be alone in his flat at St Petersburg with more mathematical problems and his mom, just like the last many years he has spent pondering over the problem. Self-promotion is not his agenda, promotion of mathematics is and that is what has made him a star among his contemporaries.

Being made out as a bit of a recluse, Dr Perelman has declined the Fields Medal, 2006, awarded every four years to a scientist not older than 40 years. The award was to be presented at the International Conference of Mathematicians at Madrid by the king of Spain, Jaun Carlos, today.

Dr Perelman’s refusal to accept the discipline’s most prestigious award has left mathematicians confused and in a bit of a shock because it is “every top mathematician’s dream prize”. Dr Perelman is stated to have said he considered himself “beyond the world mathematical community” while refusing the award.

Attending the conference at Madrid, mathematicians from India said the mood at the conference was one of dismay and confusion as delegates tried to assign their own reasons for Dr Perelman’s decision.

The President of the International Mathematical Union, Dr John Boll, who went all the way to St Petersburg to persuade Dr Perelman to accept the award, said at a press conference that the latter said he felt isolated from the world scientific community which prompted him to refuse the medal.

“Working on a problem of the magnitude of the Poincare conjecture involves lots and lots of hard work. It also means you do not venture into any other research and are practically cut off from everything and everybody - no achievements, no prizes, no money. It tends to alienate the researcher. That is probably what happened to Perelman. It is very refreshing that there are people dedicated to the subject to this extent,” a mathematician attending the conference said.

Despite living in penury in Russia, Dr Perelman is learnt to have even refused the million dollar bounty offered by financier and mathematics enthusiast Landon Clay, also the man behind the Clay mathematics Institute, on the Poincare Conjecture, considered to be one of the seven millennium prize problems.

While the organisers try to find another suitable mathematician for the award, Dr Perelman, unfazed by his success, continues to serve mathematics with unflinching devotion, unfazed by the turn of events and unperturbed by the fact that he may have scripted history by solving the Poincare Conjecture.