One of the events which I missed last week while on holiday were the latest Fields medals, awarded to Terence Tao, Grigori Perelman, Andrei Okounkov, and Wendelin Werner. I’m not familiar with Okounkov’s and Wendelin’s work (although Peter Woit has details), but I’ve met Terence, who certainly deserves the award through sheer immense volume of outstanding work alone.
But at least in the public eye Perelman looms large over his fellow medalists: the reclusive Russian genius who cracked the Poincaré conjecture refused to accept the medal, and is likely to turn down the million-dollar Clay Institute prize as well. I can’t possibly narrate Perelman’s story — and the skulduggery and politics that come with it — better than Sylvia Nasar does in the New Yorker. It’s a fascinating tale, and undoubtedly a mathematical legend in the making.
If anyone doubted that Russian mathematicians are really serious people, here’s Gromov on Perelman’s decision not to accept any awards:
Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman’s logic: “To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.”