The Math Was Complex, the Intentions, Strikingly Simple

George Johnson writes in the New York Times:

[M]athematics has been infused with the legend of the mad genius cut off from the physical world and dwelling in a separate realm of numbers. In ancient times, there was Pythagoras, guru of a cult of geometers, and Archimedes, so distracted by an equation he was scratching in the sand that he was slain by a Roman soldier. Pascal and Newton in the 17th century, Gödel in the 20th — each reinforced the image of the mathematician as ascetic, forgoing a regular life to pursue truths too rarefied for the rest of us to understand.

Last week, a reclusive Russian topologist named Grigory Perelman seemed to be playing to type, or stereotype, when he refused to accept the highest honor in mathematics, the Fields Medal, for work pointing toward the solution of Poincaré’s conjecture, a longstanding hypothesis involving the deep structure of three-dimensional objects. He left open the possibility that he would also spurn a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

Unlike Brando turning down an Academy Award or Sartre a Nobel Prize, Dr. Perelman didn’t appear to be making a political statement or trying to draw more attention to himself. It was not so much a medal that he was rejecting but the idea that in the search for nature’s secrets the discoverer is more important than the discovery.

“I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest,” he told a London newspaper, The Telegraph, instantly making himself more interesting. “I know that self-promotion happens a lot and if people want to do that, good luck to them, but I do not regard it as a positive thing.”

Johnson goes on to give a half-baked, half hearted attempt to describe Perelman's refusal to accept the Fields Medal for his solution to the Poincare Conjecture. Unfortunately, Johnson really misses the point. Here is a man who just wants to think about mathematics and study nature with his own intellect. It is a state of being few of us will ever reach yet we ought to be in awe of anyone who can do this.

In a society steeped in self-promotion for the slightest contribution to any field, we find a man who contributed to the Poincare-conjecture, proved it, and wants to leave that knowledge to others without interference. This is perhaps the most noble gesture we are likely to ever find.

The only person I know who comes close to this but misses by much is Richard Feynman who wanted to turn down the Nobel prize in physics because it would interfere with his work. Feynman accepted the prize, bought a second house with the money, and continued to work.

Perelman is not interested in a second house, wants to live where he is, and be left alone. Is there anything wrong with that?