Shattered Genius
Grigori Perelman is one of the greatest mathematicians of our time, a Russian genius who solved the Poincaré Conjecture, which plagued the brightest minds for a century. At the height of his fame, he refused a million-dollar award for his work. Then he disappeared. Our writer hunts him down on the streets of St. Petersburg.
"Perelman last gave an interview six years ago, shortly after a collective of Ph.D.s finished a three-year confirmation of his proof. Since then, the domestic and international press have harassed him into reclusion. Perelman has spurned all media requests, muttering tersely through his apartment door against a wave of journalists. “I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo,” he told one reporter. “My activity and my persona have no interest for society.” When one journalist reached him by phone, Perelman told him, “You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms.”
While Russian society has largely passed judgment on Perelman—misanthrope, wacko—I admired him for his renunciation of the modern world’s expectations, his devotion to labor, his results. He had not solicited fame or reward in proving the Poincaré, so why should he be required to react to public notice? His will was free, his results pure, and therein lay his glory."
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