Picking Mushrooms
Aha. It’s one of those moments in mathematics press coverage that the journalists love, since all the stereotypes about how weird people working on abstract things can be are able to be brought out and highlighted, and words like genius, prodigy, recluse, eccentric, etc, get thrown about in equal measure.
Yes, Grigory Perelman has being turning down stuff again. You may recall him refusing the Fields Medal four years ago. Now he is refusing the Clay Mathematics Institute’s million dollar payout. Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture a while back (see this older BBC article about that, along with a non-technical mention of the content of the conjecture – see also here, a related post the picture above right is from), which is on the Clay’s list of Big Problems whose collective heads have a bounty on them. He’s apparently a bit eccentric and the press love it, so most articles I’ve seen are mostly taken up with stuff like the following I saw in the Guardian:
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