CNN.com - Russian solves historic math problem, shuns prize
He's Jewish as well . . . (With a name like "Grigori "Grisha" Yakovlevich Perelman" how Jewish can you get?)
MADRID, Spain (AP) -- 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 his field's top minds.
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. It had proved a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space that has stumped people for 100 years . . .
The riddle Perelman tackled is called the Poincare conjecture, which essentially says that in three dimensions, a doughnut shape cannot be transformed into a sphere without ripping it, although any shape without a hole can be stretched or shrunk into a sphere . . .
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