Reclusive Mathematician May Not Accept $1 Million Prize

MOSCOW, March 23, 2009 -- A reclusive Russian mathematician who was recently awarded $1 million for solving a problem almost 100 years old said Tuesday he is not sure if he will accept the prize.

A children's charity and communist group have suggested that the money should be donated to them.

The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., announced last week that Grigori Perelman would be awarded a million-dollar Millennium Prize for solving the famous Poincaré conjecture, a problem first posed in 1904 by mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré that has stumped mathematicians for generations.

"I have not yet made a decision," Perelman said, according to a recording of a phone call with him posted by the Russian Web site LifeNews.ru.

"If I decide, the Clay Institute, which established the prize, will be the first to know," he continued. "But so far nothing has been decided."

The Warm Home children's charity in St. Petersburg wrote Perelman an open letter Tuesday, asking him to donate the money to Russian charities.

"Unfortunately, unlike in the case of mathematical problems, no universal approach can be found toward solving human problems. Each suffering child and each mother entangled in circumstances of her life could receive help," the chairwoman of the charity wrote.

Communist activists in St. Petersburg were more aggressive in their request, responding to an earlier report that Perelman would not be accepting the money. They proposed to use it to build a research facility and support the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow.

"We are willing to explain to him that, if he does not take the money, it will be spent on American scientists working on nuclear weapons," the leader of the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region Communists told the Interfax news agency.

The Poincaré conjecture is one of math's most difficult and important theorems, and a key to the three-dimensional study of topology. It says, in essence, that unless an object has a hole, it is considered a sphere.

Perelman started posting sketches of a proof of the Poincaré conjecture online in late 2002. It was then studied for the next several years by teams of mathematicians who eventually determined he was correct.