A reclusive Russian genius won a major academic prize on Tuesday for solving one of history’s toughest math problems, but he refused to accept the award—a stunning renunciation of accolades from the top minds in his field.Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St Petersburg, was praised for work that might help scientists figure out nothing less than the shape of the universe.Colleagues say he also seems uninterested in a $1 million prize he might be due over his feat of wizardry: proving a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space that has stumped very smart people for 100 years.The award, called a Fields Medal, was announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians, an event held every four years, this time in Madrid. Three other mathematicians—another Russian, a Frenchman and an Australian—also won Fields honours this year. “I regret that Dr Perelman has declined to accept the medal,” said John Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union. The riddle Perelman tackled is called the Poincare conjecture, which essentially says that in three dimensions you cannot transform a doughnut shape into a sphere without ripping.
