Grigory Perelman is not a comper. He’s a maths genius! He’s in the news and also on Perez Hilton as he’s just turned down a $1million prize after becoming the first man to solve one of the world’s most complex mathematical problems, the Poincare Conjecture. It’s not the first time Grigory has turned down a prize. He turned down The Fields Medal, the highest award for Maths, in 2006 and is happy to live his life away from money and fame. You can find out more in the YouTube clip above. There’s plenty of comment about whether he should accept the prize or not, but it’s his decision and that should be respected.
Millenium Prize Problems
However, if we have a reclusive maths genius on Loquax then we have some good news for you.
The Poincare Conjecture is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems. Grigory has solved one of them, which leaves six (we can do maths yay) for you to try. These are P versus NP, The Hodge conjecture, The Riemann hypothesis, Yang–Mills existence and mass gap, Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness and The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Each of the problems carries it’s own $1million prize too. The closing date for each problem is as and when someone solves it and we can safely say we think these will be low entry. The only downside is that they’ve been around 10 years now, so if you’re thinking of giving them a try you might have a few years research to catch up. We’ll be going back to the usual, non-mathematical and much easier to enter competitions though.