4 ms·
Grigori Perelman (Solver of Poincare Conjecture)
- redis_mlc 6y agoI followed his story back when he "won" the Fields Medal and the Clay prize - and rejected them. It was hilarious. :) I think he lived with his mom, and just didn't want to slight his colleagues. It might also be a socialism thing (some millionaires got doxxed and catch the eye of the state in Russia.) More seriously, the math community is always waiting for a "savior", so I hope he continues to contribute to the math world because there's not that many capable of the "high notes" like him. ("Good Will Hunting" and "A Beautiful Mind" were close to reality in depicting the freakish math talent needed for novel math proofs.) If you read the Wikipedia article, you'll notice that a Chinese team rewrote his proof in detail. In China, it's very common to insist on writing each step before going on to the next one, otherwise the proof is not considered acceptable as being actually finished. It's just a cultural thing, similar to how in the computer security community a working exploit is expected before anybody believes you.