From The New York Times

8/22/2006

MADRID, Spain - A reclusive Russian won an academic prize Tuesday
for work toward solving one of history's toughest math problems, but
he refused to accept the award _ a stunning renunciation of
accolades from the top minds in his field.

Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St. Petersburg, was
praised for work in the field known as topology, which studies
shapes, and for a breakthrough that might help scientists figure out
nothing less than the shape of the universe.

But besides shunning the medal, academic colleagues say he also
seems uninterested in a separate, $1 million prize he might be
awarded for his feat, which proved a theorem about the nature of
multidimensional space that has stumped people for 100 years.

The Fields Medal was announced at the International Congress of
Mathematicians, an event held every four years, this time in Madrid.

Additional info on Dr. Grigori (Grisha) Perelman:

His most important contributions so far is to Ricci flow. Many also
believe that he has proven the Poincaré conjecture, which is
universally held to be one of the most important open problems in
mathematics.

Perelman has posted a few papers to an online archive. Although he
has no known plans to publish them, his work has sent shock waves
through what is usually a quiet field. The way he announced his
proof - which took eight years to complete - was unusual. Rather
than publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, he posted three
manuscripts in an online archive of math and physics papers.

"He placed the papers on the web archive and basically said 'that's
it'," Nigel Hitchin, professor of mathematics at Oxford University
said. "A lot of details needed to be filled in. And there's a bit of
squabbling in the background actually about who was first to fill in
the details." The most recent of the papers fleshing out his proof
runs to a mind-numbing 473 pages.

If Perelman really has proved the so-called Poincare Conjecture, as
many believe he has, he will become known as one of the great
mathematicians of the 21st century and will be first in line for a
$1 million prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge.