MOSCOW (AFP) - – Reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory
Perelman, who shot to global fame after claiming to solve the
seemingly intractable Poincare conjecture, has refused another
prize for the achievement.
The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) said Thursday that Perelman
informed the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research center that he
would not accept its million-dollar prize.
"I have turned down (the award)," Perelman told the Interfax
news agency by telephone. "The main reason is disagreement with the
organised mathematics community. I do not like their decisions, I
consider them unfair."
"I think that the contribution of American mathematician
(Richard) Hamilton in solving this problem is no less than
mine."
On June 8-9, the institute held a conference in Paris to
celebrate Perelman's resolution of the Poincare conjecture, a
riddle on properties of multi-dimensional space that had perplexed
mathematicians since it was coined by Frenchman Henri Poincare in
1904.
The prize was announced after teams of experts examining his
findings found Perelman's solution to be flawless.
CMI said it would announce in the fall how the prize money
turned down by Perelman "will be used to benefit mathematics."
Perelman, who is also known as Grisha Perelman, already has a
long history of turning down awards and not showing up at award
ceremonies.
He published his findings on the Internet in 2002 and 2003, and
by 2006, Perelman was awarded the mathematics world's version of a
Nobel prize, the Fields Medal, as experts said he had indeed worked
it all out.
But the 44-year-old mathematician became the first person to
turn down a Fields Prize, awarded every four years since 1936,
saying he did not want to be a figurehead for the mathematics
community from which he says he has withdrawn.
The Poincare conjecture is regarded as one of the most important
questions in topology, a geometry-related branch of mathematics
which deals with spatial properties.
In simple layman's terms, it asserts that any shape without a
hole can be stretched or shrunk into a sphere.