Shy Russian may have made maths breakthrough

EXETER (Reuters) - A reclusive Russian may have solved one of the world's toughest mathematics problems and stands to win $1 million (560 million pounds) -- but he doesn't appear to care.


Grigori Perelman from St. Petersburg claims to have solved the horrendously complicated Poincare Conjecture that tries to explain the behaviour of multi-dimensional shapes in space, thereby making himself eligible for the prize offered by the Massachusetts-based Clay Mathematics Institute.


But there's a snag. He has simply posted his results on the Internet and left his peers to work out for themselves whether he is right -- something they are still struggling to do.


"There is good reason to believe that Perelman's approach is correct. But the trouble is, he won't talk to anybody about it and has shown no interest in the money," said Keith Devlin, Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University in California.


"There won't be a golden moment when he is suddenly accepted as being right. There will just be a drift in that direction," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

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