About Grigori Perelman

Famous for solving the Poincaré conjecture.

As of 2020, the Poincaré conjecture is the only solved Millennium problem.

I got a C in Calculus, c. 2003; UPRRP. It was hard work, and I barely remember anything from the class. Knowing this, and always compensating for the fact that I suck at math, I’ve always been curious about people that have excelled on the subject. People like Alan Turing, Euclides, Hypatia, Ada Lovelace…

This is how I came across Grigori Perelman —
Russian, mathematician, and an incredibly moral person:

“[The Fields Medal] was completely irrelevant for me. Everybody understood that if the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed [;] I’m not interested in money or fame [,] I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I’m not a hero of mathematics. I’m not even that successful; that is why I don’t want to have everybody looking at me.”

Related Media:

Fragment of the poem “In Praise of Fractals”, by Emily Grosholz:

Some fractal sets are curves
(space-filling curves!) or complex surfaces;
others are wholly disconnected ‘dusts’;
others are just too odd to have a name.
Poincaré once observed,
there may be questions that we choose to ask,
but others ask themselves,
sometimes for centuries, while no one listens.