Aug 22, 2006, 12:03 GMT
Madrid - The highest award of the mathematical world was made Tuesday to four scientists - but one, Russian Grigory Perelman, refused the honour entitling him to a million-dollar US prize.
The International Congress of Mathematicians awarded the Fields Medal, regarded as the mathematical Nobel, to 40-year-old Perelman, his countryman Andrei Okounkov, Australian Terence Tao and France's Wendelin Werner in the Spanish capital Madrid.
Perelman was granted his share of the award worth 11,000 euros (14,000 dollars) for solving the Poincare Conjecture, one of the biggest mathematical problems which has defied the world's best brains for over a century.
His discovery also qualifies him for a million-dollar award from the Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States.
Yet King Juan Carlos only presented the medal to the three other winners, with International Mathematical Union president John Ball announcing that Perelman had rejected the prize.
Mathematics was a basic tool for understanding the world, an 'unquestionable' pillar of education and an 'indispensable' instrument for ensuring human progress, the Spanish monarch said in his inaugural address.
Some 3,500 mathematicians from 126 countries attended the congress, held every four years since 1936, which was hosted by Spain for the first time.
The countries with the most representatives included Spain, the United States, Japan, France, India and Germany.
Perelman became the first person to turn down the Fields Medal, which is awarded to mathematicians aged up to 40 years to promote investigation.
The Russian reportedly felt the prize was 'irrelevant' and that the correctness of his discovery was a sufficient reward. 'I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest,' he was quoted by India's Sunday Telegraph as saying.
The other winners welcomed the news. Okounkov, who works at Princeton University in the United States, said he was attempting to 'connect mathematics with other scientific areas.'
Tao, 31, from the University of California, said he was surprised at his work being recognized at such a young age.
The congress also awarded two other prizes, the Nevanlinna Prize to American John Kleinberg for contributing to information sciences and the new Gauss Prize to Japanese Kiyoshi Ito for research with applications outside mathematics.
Perelman's enigmatic reputation and the expectation that he would refuse the Fields Medal increased curiosity towards the reclusive scientist born in Saint Petersburg.
Perelman recently resigned from the Steklov Institute in his native city, reportedly in disappointment of its treatment of him.
The mathematician, who prefers picking mushrooms to giving interviews, is believed to be unemployed and living with his mother on her small pension.
Perelman made his discovery - the fruit of a decade of work - public in a characteristically humble fashion, explaining his ideas on the internet and in a few lectures in the United States instead of publishing them in an academic journal.
'Money is not so important for him. He is completely absorbed by science,' Perelman's former colleagues were quoted by Spanish reports as saying.
'This man is an introvert. Perhaps sometimes he gives the impression of a slightly insane person. But madness is not a vice. On the contrary, it is the quality of bright mathematicians,' said Eugene Damaskinsky, Perelman's former colleague at the Steklov Institute.
Formulated by French mathematician Henri Poincare in 1904, the Poincare Conjecture studying the properties of shapes states that a certain condition suffices to ensure that a manifold is homeomorphic to a sphere.
The Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States has offered a million dollars for the first published proof of the conjecture, which could provide clues to the shape of the universe.
In 1996, Perelman refused a prize from the European Mathematics Society on the grounds that the jury was not qualified to judge his work.
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