Grigori Perelman isn't much for prizes. This week Perelman, one of the world best and strangest mathematicians, proved it again by turning down a $1 million dollar prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize for solving one of the most troubling math problems of the last century.
The Poincaré conjecture, named after prominent French mathematician Henri Poincaré, involves a complex problem in the field of topology -- an important area of math that studies the enduring properties of objects that are stretched or otherwise deformed, but not torn or otherwise reconstituted. Scores of prominent mathematicians tried to solve it over decades but failed, leading to its characterization as the Mount Everest of math [Washington Post].
