the world's genius turnes down a million dollar prize

"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", - says Grigori Perelman, probably the world's greatest mathematician, who lives in Saint-Petersburg with his mother.

He worked out a solution to one of the seven great unsolved mathematical problems, the Poincaré conjecture, in 2002 - almost a century after it was first posed, and just two years after the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a one-million-dollar prize for its solution. It was a magnificent achievement. Honours, cash, offers of world lecture tours and lucrative teaching posts were hurled at the Russian theorist. But Perelman turned down the Fields medal, the mathematical world's equivalent of a Nobel prize. What was even more astonishing was that he turned down a million of dollars that the Clay Institute wanted to give him for his work. 
One of my friends admires him so much, he said this was such a rare gesture it is almost impossible to believe it.

Grigori Perelman is now 45 (he was born on June 13th 1966). Ever since he was a child he was obsessed with mathematics. He turned down a scholarship to study in the United States and he graduated in Leningrad (now Saint-Petersburg). Since the begginning of the 1990's he worked at the prestigious Institute of Mathematics named after Steklov in Saint-Petersburg.
Now, he has given up his job as mathematician and has no contact with media at all. He lives in his own fragile world, filled with books and his manuscripts.

Some might argue that monetary awards for mathematical work are inappropriate, or that the Poincaré Conjecture is of little practical value and not worth the one-million-dollar prize. But do we owe respect to him? Yes, and not only as a mathematician. We must respect his gesture, a rare gesture in the world where money decides everything.