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Tale of a Russian mathematics genius

Kamran Chowdhury

IMAGINE turning down a prize worth one million dollars!!! Yes, you heard it right...one million dollars!! This crazy thing was done by none but the genius mathematician from Russia who won the Fields Medal, which is considered equivalent to Nobel Prize. His name is Gregori Perelman of the Steklov Institute of Mathematis in SP Petersburg, Russia.

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to young mathematcians who have made the biggest impact in their fields. Perelman achieved fame in the mathematic world for his work on the Poincare Conjecture, one of topology's most celebrated problems. The conjecture, conceived by the French mathematician Henri Poincare in 1904, relates to the question of whether it is possible to deform a holed doughnut into a sphere by bending and stretching it without cutting or tearing it.

It turns out that there is no way to remove the "hole" in the doughnut and so it cannot be turned into a sphere. However, any shape that has no holes can always be deformed into a sphere. The Poincare Conjecture and a more general problem, called the Thurston Geometrization Conjecture, assert that the same is true for shapes in higher dimensions.

Unprecedented refusal. Perelman's proof of both problems, published in 2002, received widespread admiration for its inventiveness, even though mathematicians have yet to officially pronounce on its validity. "The consensus is that it is probably correct," says du Sautoy. The Poincare conjecture is also famous as one of the Millennium Prize problems established by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Boston in 2000. The Institute is offering a prize of $1 million to the first correct proof." Perelman doesn't seem to be interested in medals or money," du Sautoy notes.

A refusal of a Fields Medal would be unprecedented. In 1966, the German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck refused to pick up his award in Moscow in protest against the Soviet Union's military intervention in Eastern Europe, although he did later accept it. But Grothendieck also became disillusioned with mathematics and left the field. He is now believed to be living as a hermit in Andorra.

Source of information: The New Scientist

Google provides printable versions of classic books on Internet

Agence France-Presse
San Francisco

GOOGLE made classic literary works available for free down load in printable format as part of its controversial quest to make the world's books available online.

No longer copyrighted works such as Dante Alighieri's 'Inferno' and Victor Hugo's 'Marion de Lorme', can be printed out at the Google Book Search website http://books.google.com, according to the company.

'Users can search and read these books on Google Book Search like always, but now they can also download and print them to enjoy at their own pace', the Mountain View, California company said in a release.

'We do not enable downloading of any books under copyright'.

With copyrighted material, Google only displays basic information and snippets of text along with information regarding where to get the books.