Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Too Cool for the Prize (in a Geeky Sort of Way)
A Russian math genius, Grigory "Grisha" Perelman, has turned down a Fields medal - an award many consider the Nobel Prize of math. Perlman is sometimes described as "unconventional," but you have to admire a guy who can walk away from an award coveted by most of his peers, and who can solve the Poincare conjecture, first described over a hundred years ago.
Few who have turned down other big prizes--Sartre and Pasternak, the Nobel Prize for Literature, George C. Scott and Marlon Brando, the Academy Award--have seemed less cool after the snub, but you can go too far the other way as well. Witness:
Only one person has refused a Fields medal previously. The German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck declined his 1966 award in Moscow in protest against the Soviet Union's military intervention in Eastern Europe, though he later accepted it.
He subsequently became disillusioned with the upper echelons of the math world and is said to live as a hermit in Andorra.
Few who have turned down other big prizes--Sartre and Pasternak, the Nobel Prize for Literature, George C. Scott and Marlon Brando, the Academy Award--have seemed less cool after the snub, but you can go too far the other way as well. Witness:
Only one person has refused a Fields medal previously. The German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck declined his 1966 award in Moscow in protest against the Soviet Union's military intervention in Eastern Europe, though he later accepted it.
He subsequently became disillusioned with the upper echelons of the math world and is said to live as a hermit in Andorra.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 5:12 PM 
