“You Are Disturbing Me. I Am Picking Mushrooms.” – that was Grigory Perelman’s response to a reporter who tried to interview him last week.
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician who just last week won a $1 million prize money for solving one of math’s most intractable problems, a century-old puzzle called the Poincaré conjecture. There’s just one problem: Perelman doesn’t want the money, and he won’t say why. In fact, he just won’t say anything. When the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge validated his proof 8 years after he first submitted it (yes, it took that long to verify his claim), Perelman has been in hiding, holed up in his Moscow apartment, where he lives with his mother and sister.
Perelman, who actually quit mathematics some years ago because he felt his fellow mathematicians were all majorly sub-par, is this week’s Awesome Person Of The Week!


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Awesome Person Of The Week – Grigory Perelman
“You Are Disturbing Me. I Am Picking Mushrooms.” – that was Grigory Perelman’s response to a reporter who tried to interview him last week.
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician who just last week won a $1 million prize money for solving one of math’s most intractable problems, a century-old puzzle called the Poincaré conjecture. There’s just one problem: Perelman doesn’t want the money, and he won’t say why. In fact, he just won’t say anything. When the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge validated his proof 8 years after he first submitted it (yes, it took that long to verify his claim), Perelman has been in hiding, holed up in his Moscow apartment, where he lives with his mother and sister.
Perelman, who actually quit mathematics some years ago because he felt his fellow mathematicians were all majorly sub-par, is this week’s Awesome Person Of The Week!
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