Perelman: Reclusive life of a maths genius

SAINT PETERSBURG: Grigory Perelman, a Russian recluse who on Tuesday won one of the world's top mathematics prizes, has shunned global fame and cut himself off from the outside world, former colleagues said.

Perelman, 40, snared a Fields Medal, regarded as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics.

But he declined to accept the medal and did not attend the ceremony with King Juan Carlos of Spain, telling AFP by telephone that he instead spent the day "watching television".

Perelman refused to comment on the award.

"I will not tell you anything, I refuse to give interviews," he said by telephone from his apartment in Saint Petersburg. "I will not even tell you why I'm refusing to speak about the prize."

Former colleagues in his native city said his behaviour fits with a pattern for a man who has rejected international acclaim.

"He was very polite but he didn't talk very much," said Natalya Stepanovna, a former colleague at the Steklov Mathematics Institute in Saint Petersburg.

He resigned from the institute suddenly on January 1 without giving any explanation. Former colleagues said they have not seen him since.

"Maybe he wanted to be free to do his research," Stepanovna mused.

Sergei Novikov, deputy head of the institute, said Perelman started working on the Poincare Conjecture, the maths formula that he is credited with solving, in 1992.

"But since he started displaying eccentricities in his character, I thought he would never complete his ideas. As it turns out, he finished his project," Novikov was quoted by the Gazeta daily as saying.

"I tried to get him into the academy of sciences, I gave him a scholarship, but he stubbornly turned all this down," Novikov said.

A rare photograph provided by the Steklov Mathematics Institute shows blue-eyed Perelman, with a thick beard and bushy eyebrows, staring straight at the camera, his jersey zipped up to the neck.

Perelman was born on June 13, 1966 in Leningrad, as Saint Petersburg was known in Soviet times. His former maths teacher Tamara Yefimova, remembers him simply as "Grisha."

Yefimova, head of the prestigious maths academy where he studied, school number 239, said Perelman was "a brilliant pupil... talented in every subject except sport."

Aged 16, he won the top prize at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Budapest in 1982 with the top score.

"Mathematics was always the most important thing for him. But I can't say that he was very closed or anti-social. It's not true. He had friends and he played the violin," Yefimova said.

"I understand why he doesn't want to be in contact with journalists, he's a real sage, who is only interested in truth and not the chatter around it," she added.

Perelman went on to complete a doctorate in mathematics, specialising in topology, a geometry-related branch of mathematics that analyzes the shape of objects in space.

He then taught at US universities, including the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), before returning to Russia in the mid-1990s.

In 1996, he won an award at the Second European Congress of Mathematics in Budapest. Russian newspapers said that he turned down the prize because he considered the jury insufficiently qualified.

But Perelman's international fame in the mathematics world came in 2002 and 2003 when he published two papers online that appeared to solve the Poincare Conjecture.

The riddle had perplexed mathematicians since it was posited by Frenchman Henri Poincare in 1904. In just 61 pages of sketchily written notes, Perelman seemed to prove it but he never published a full proof in academic journals.

The conjecture was one of the so-called Millenium Prize Problems for which the Clay Mathematics Institute in Boston announced a one-million-dollar prize. Perelman never picked up the prize money.

A former colleague, Yevgeny Damaskinsky, said he was "a very introverted person" who does not care for the money, only his work, Izvestia reported.

"Sometimes he gives the impression of being slightly mad, but that is a quality all good mathematicians have."