Russian Mathematical Genius Confused by Simple Algebraic Equation

Russian mathematician Grigoriy Perelman has ignored an invitation from the Clay Mathematical Institute to come to Paris to receive a $1 million prize for the resolution of the Poincaré conjecture.

Of all the seven Clay's Millennial prizes up for grabs, only the Poincaré conjecture has been solved. The following video briefly describes the efforts made to come up with a solution:


When Perelman refused the Fields medal in 2006, it was the open question around the scientific community whether he would also do the same for the Millenium prize. Fields is worth a mere $15,000 [in Canadian dollars, that is! -ed], and with an almost guaranteed Clay award coming his way it was thought the first refusal could be political while in the second case he'd take the money.

Now, however, it seems Perelman is just batshit crazy -- which in fact is not an incredibly shocking thing for anybody who follows the career of mathematical or physics geniuses. Excluding, of course, the author of this blog, whom all can agree is perfectly reasonable. If nothing else, I understand this key equation that Perelman has difficulty with:


Bonus Clay Millennium Prize Info:

The P=NP Problem is probably the most important of the Clay problems: the Clay website explains that even far-flung future supercomputers could never use brute force to achieve a simple goal like planning the optimum NHL schedule...but if P=NP can be (constructively) solved, they won't have to. It turns out to also have the coolest way to prove it: play a lot of minesweeper. Disclaimer: This won't actually help.

The only Clay problem I've worked on personally, mostly during hot showers, has been the Riemann Problem. The best thing about this problem is that after it baffles you for a few dozen hours in Rutherford Library at the cost of several angrily-broken pencils, you can gain future notoriety by writing a letter claiming to have solved an even harder problem, write a whole bunch of unrelated papers with densely packed margins of half-proofs and notes, and people will believe you did it for ninety-eight years. It's also fun to alternate between proofs that it is true versus proofs that it is false, since the latter case makes you seem evil and badassed. Disclaimer: Though it won't break internet security, it'll just piss off a lot of people who expect their prime numbers to distribute evenly.