The Genius Who Refused a Million Dollars

This text recounts the remarkable story of Grigori Perelman, a reclusive Russian mathematician who solved the Poincaré conjecture, a century-old problem regarding the fundamental shape of the universe. After working in isolation for seven years to complete a complex mathematical program involving Ricci flow, Perelman posted his proof online for free and refused a million-dollar prize and the prestigious Fields Medal. The narrative highlights the corruption and credit-grabbing within the mathematical establishment, specifically involving Shing-Tung Yau, which ultimately led Perelman to abandon the field entirely. Rather than being a sign of madness, his withdrawal is portrayed as a principled stand against a system he found ethically lacking. Today, Perelman lives a modest life in St. Petersburg, having chosen intellectual integrity and personal clarity over fame or financial gain. He remains a singular figure who mastered the logic of the universe only to reject the flawed human institutions that govern his profession.

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Okay, let's unpack this. I want you to picture a scene. The year is 2010,

Unknown Speaker  0:05  
you are standing in the hallway of an apartment block in St Petersburg, Russia. And it is not the, you know, the glamorous Imperial St Petersburg you see in travel brochures, right? Definitely not. No. This is the grim post Soviet reality. The building is literally crumbling. The air smells like old dust and boiled cabbage. The wallpaper is peeling off in these long, sad strips. It's a setting that feels stripped right out of a Dostoevsky novel, honestly bleak, cold and utterly devoid of luxury, exactly. And inside one of these apartments, living with roaches and accumulated clutter, is a man in his mid 40s. He is living with his elderly mother, and they are surviving essentially on her pension. We are talking about roughly $160

Unknown Speaker  0:49  
a month total. Total for two people, they are hovering on the absolute fringe of poverty. It's a pure survival, existence. Every single ruble counts at that point, and then the implanting incident happens, the phone rings, or, well, rather, a message comes through the door, because they barely even answer the phone, and this man is offered $1 million the clay Millennium prize, right? This isn't a scam. This isn't some Nigerian prince email. This is the Nobel Prize of mathematics. Effectively, the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts has identified seven impossible problems you solve. One, you get a million bucks. No strings attached. And this man, Gregory Perelman, looks at the offer and he says no, and he doesn't just politely decline, either. He doesn't say, Let me think about it, or speak to my agent. He flat out refuses. He simply says, I do not want it. He turns down a fortune that would fix the apartment, feed his mother, completely change his entire life, and naturally, the world goes absolutely nuts. Over this, a journalist finally manages to track him down to ask the question everyone is screaming at their televisions, which is, are you out of your mind? And peril? Min gives an answer that I think is one of the most haunting things ever said by a human being, I know exactly the quote you're thinking of, yeah? He says, I have learned to compute hollowness. I know how to control the universe. Why would I run after a million tell me I know how to control the universe. Yeah, that phrase just stops you cold. It sends a shiver down the spine. It really does. And I think for most people, the immediate reaction to that summary, you know, the poverty, the refusal, the controlling the universe. Comment is to just write him off. The narrative becomes very simple. He's the mad genius. He's the guy who cracked under the pressure. He stared at the son of knowledge too long and went blind. That is the standard narrative. We love that trope as a society. It's that beautiful mind idea that high intelligence requires madness as a tax. But our mission today on this deep dive is to flip that narrative completely on its head, because if you look at the source material, if you look at the actual facts of his life, that narrative isn't just lazy, it's objectively wrong, wrong. How Perelman didn't leave mathematics because he was crazy. He left because he was the only one who was seeing things clearly. He didn't lose his mind. He just applied the exact same ruthless, absolute binary logic that he used to solve the hardest math problem in existence, and he applied it to real life, yes, he applied it to the social institution of science itself. So he essentially ran the numbers on the people around him essentially, yes, he ran the logic on the community, on the ethics of the field, and when the logic told him the system was corrupt, he didn't negotiate, he didn't compromise or write an angry op ed, he just hit delete. That is a much heavier and, frankly, much more uncomfortable reality to deal with. It implies that we are the crazy ones for playing the game, precisely. So today we're going to unpack exactly how we got there. We need to look at three massive things. First, the monster. He slew, the pointer, a conjecture. We really need to understand why this problem destroyed careers for 99 years, which means we're going to have to do a little topology, 101, for you listening, but I promise we'll keep it grounded. No pop quizzes. Second, we're going to trace the rise of Perelman. How does the Soviet prodigy become a global icon? We have to understand the system that built him. And third, and this is the really spicy part, we are going to expose the absolute ethical rot inside the elite world of high stakes mathematics that ultimately drove him into the woods. It's a story about math, sure, but really, beneath all that, it's a story about integrity and the terrible, terrible price you pay for having it absolutely so let's start with a monster, the Poincare conjecture. This thing has been around since 1904 1904 Henri Poincare, he was a French giant of mathematics, a true polymath, and when he proposed this problem, he actually wrote a little note in the margins of his paper, didn't he? He did. He wrote a final line in his notes that simply said, this question would take us too far. Take us too far. That feels like a warning label on a tomb in an Indiana Jones movie. And he was completely right. It took 99 years to find out just how far. For an entire century, this problem was a graveyard for mathematicians.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
Yeah, it was famous for destroying reputations. I saw in the research that there was a paper literally titled How not to prove the Poincare conjecture. Yes, that was John Stallings back in 1966 he was a brilliant mathematician in his own right, but he had fallen into one of the massive traps of the problem. He eventually realized his mistake, and instead of hiding it out of shame, he published a paper warning others. It was basically a public service announcement, saying, here are the cliffs you will fall off if you try this. That is how bad it got. People were claiming proofs, popping champagne, and then having to retract them in utter humiliation a few months later. So let's define the beast. What actually was the question. To understand the question, you have to shift your brain out of normal geometry mode and into topology mode. Okay, define the distinction for us. How is that different? Well, in standard geometry, the stuff you learned in high school with graph paper and protractors, rigid shape matters. A square is fundamentally different from a circle. A triangle is different from a rectangle. Distances matter, angles matter. If you stretch a square, it's not a square anymore, right? That makes sense. It becomes a rectangle or a rhombus topology is different. We often call it rubber sheet geometry. In topology, we don't care about the rigid shape at all. We don't care about distance. We only care about connections. We care about the fundamental properties of an object that stay the exact same, even if you stretch it, twist it or squish it, as long as you don't tear it or glue it together, right? Those are the rules, exactly no tearing, no gluing. Everything else is fair game. So the classic example, the one you hear at every cocktail party with a mathematician, is the coffee mug and the donut, the breakfast analogy, right? If you have a coffee mug made of soft, pliable clay. You can imagine squashing the cup part down. You push the material into the handle. You keep molding it and smoothing it and squishing it until the whole thing is just a single ring, like a donut. Like a donut, you didn't punch a new hole, you didn't tear anything. You just reshaped the mass. So to a topologist, a coffee mug and a donut are the exact same object. They are topologically equivalent because they both have exactly one hole. Okay, I'm with you. One hole equals one hole. The vessel. Part of the mug is just a dent. It doesn't pierce all the way through precisely. Now, take a basketball, a sphere. Can you turn a basketball into a donut without tearing it. I don't see how you could. You'd have to punch a hole through the middle to make the donut shape exactly. You'd have to perform a tear or a puncture. That violates the rules of topology. So a sphere and a donut are topologically distinct. One has zero holes, the other has one. Simple enough. So why on earth? Did this take 100 years to figure out? Because Poincare wasn't asking about donuts sitting on a kitchen table. He was asking about the universe. He was asking about three dimensional space. And this is where human intuition completely breaks down, because we live inside the 3d space. We can't step outside of the universe to look at its shape, right? Imagine you are a tiny ant living on the surface of a giant balloon. To you, the world looks completely flat. You can walk forward, backward, left, right. You are on a 2d surface wrapping around a 3d object. You can't see the curve because you're too small and you're stuck right on the surface. But if you were a very smart ant, a mathematician ant, could you figure out the shape of your world without stepping off it? You need a test, something you can do from the inside to measure the outside. Enter the rubber band test. This is the crucial concept of the conjecture. Imagine the ant has a giant, infinitely stretchy rubber band. He walks all the way around the balloon and stretches the rubber band around the equator. Okay, so the balloon now has a rubber band belt. Then he starts to shrink the rubber band. He lets it slide along the surface of the balloon. On a balloon a sphere. Is there anything to stop that rubber band from shrinking all the way down to a single point? No, it just slides over the smooth curve of the rubber until it snaps down to a tiny dot, right? We call that simply connected. Now, imagine the ant is living on the surface of a giant donut. He wraps his rubber band through the hole like a necklace chain passing through the center of the donut and around the outside. I see where this is going now he tries to shrink it. What happens? It gets stuck. The hole gets in the way the rubber band would tighten around the inner ring of the dough, but it can't shrink to a point unless it physically cuts through the pastry exactly so without ever leaving the surface. The ant knows if my rubber band gets stuck, I'm on a donut. If it shrinks to a point smoothly, I'm on a sphere. Okay, that makes total sense. That's actually a really elegant way to visualize it for those of us who aren't math prodigies. So Poincare asked this specific question, if we look at our universe, our 3d reality, and we send out virtual rubber bands in every single direction, deep into space, loop them around galaxies, and we find that every single one of them can be shrunk back down to a point. Does that?

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
Mathematically guarantee that our universe is a sphere. It sounds like the answer has to be yes. If there are no holes to catch the rubber band anywhere, it's a sphere. It feels intuitively obvious. It feels like common sense, but proving it mathematically with absolute rigorous certainty in three dimensions turned out to be the hardest thing in the history of the field. And here is the kicker that drives mathematicians absolutely crazy. This problem was actually solved for other dimensions decades before Perelman even touched it. I saw it on the notes, and I genuinely had to double check it, dimension five, dimension four. Those were easier. That feels completely backwards to how my brain works. It feels totally backwards to everyone. Steven Smale proved it for five dimensions and up back in the 1960s Michael Friedman proved it for four dimensions in the 1980s but three dimensions, the one we actually live in, was the monster. Why? Why is three harder than four or five or 100 it comes down to room to maneuver. Think about a tight knot in a shoelace. If you have a tangled knot in three dimensions is locked. To untie it, you physically have to loop the string around itself, or you have to find the loose end and thread it back through. But if you had a fourth spatial dimension, you could literally pull the string through itself without it ever touching. You have an entirely extra direction to bypass the tangle. Oh, wow. Like stepping over a wall instead of having to walk all the way around it exactly in five dimensions or four dimensions, there is enough extra space to untie the geometric knots. The math has built in escape routes. But in three dimensions, it's completely cramped. There is no extra room to push the problematic geometry out of the way. The geometry gets locked in on itself. It's basically the Goldilocks zone of difficulty. It's too complex to use simple 2d logic, but too tight to use high dimensional tricks. So the third dimensional was the ultimate trap, and it just sat there for 99 years mocking everyone it destroyed anyone who touched it. Enter Grigori Perelman. Let's look at the architect, because Perelman wasn't just born a genius Herman in the woods. He was built deliberately by a very specific system. He was born in 1966 in Leningrad, the Soviet Union. This is the absolute height of the Cold War, and the first key figure in his life is his mother, Lubov. She was a math teacher. She actually abandoned her own graduate studies in mathematics to raise him. There's this incredible story that she didn't spend a single night away from him until he was 15 years old. She taught him the violin, and she taught him to see the whole world through numbers. She instilled this incredible, almost frightening focus, and then she hands him off to the coach, Sergei rukshin. Rukshin is an absolute legend in the math world. He was only a 19 year old undergrad when he started tutoring Perelman. He ran this intense, highly competitive math club for prodigies, but his fundamental philosophy was very, very different from what we see in the west today. How so well today, in the US or Europe, we are obsessed with speed, time tests, flash cards. Who can finish the worksheet first? Who raises their hand the fastest in class? Ruckshan hated that. He told Perelman, speed means absolutely nothing. Math is about depth. I love that so much. Stop rushing. Dig deeper. He taught Perelman to verify everything, to never speak until he was absolutely certain of the foundation. If it took you three days to solve a single problem, but you understood it at a molecular level that was vastly superior to solving it in five minutes by memorizing some formula that training clearly stuck with him for life. But there was another reason Perelman had to be perfect wasn't there, and this is the much darker side of the Soviet story, the systemic anti semitism. Yes, this wasn't just casual prejudice in the hallways. This was literally built into the university system. The Soviet Union had excellent universities like Leningrad State University, but they had very strict unwritten quotas. They didn't want too many Jewish students getting higher education right. And to enforce these quotas without putting it in writing, they used what they called coffin problems. Coffin problems, that is a terrifying name for a math question who was meant to be during the oral entrance exams. If a Jewish student walked into the room, the examiners would pull out a math problem that was purposely designed to be unsolvable in the time allotted or the wording was so deliberately ambiguous that no matter what answer you gave, they could justify marking it wrong. It was a completely rigged game designed to fail you on the spot. That is horrific. So how did Perelman ever get in? If the game is rigged, how do you win? He needed a shield, and the only shield strong enough to penetrate that level of state corruption was undeniable, objective perfection. There was one loophole in the system. If you made the Soviet team for the International Mathematical Olympiad, the IMO, and you won gold, you got automatic unquestioned entry to the university. You bypass the corrupt examiners entirely. They couldn't touch you. So he didn't just have to be good, he had to be the literal best in the world, or he didn't have a future. That's an insane amount of pressure for a teenager. That's the pressure cooker he grew up in. So in 19.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
82 he goes to the IMO in Budapest, and he gets a perfect score, 42 out of 42 flawless perfection as a pure survival strategy, exactly. And you have to understand this established his relationship with institutions very early on, he learned that institutions are barriers, that people are inherently biased and corrupt, and that the only thing you can ever really trust, the only thing that will actually save you is absolute truth. The math doesn't lie. People lie all the time. Math doesn't that explains so much about his later behavior. Wow. So he survives the Soviet system. The iron curtain falls. It's the early 90s, and Perelman comes to America. This is his American era. He spends time at NYU Stony Brook, Berkeley, and he cuts a very striking figure on campus. Yeah. The descriptions of him from this time are just great. Rasputin like is the word everyone seems to use. He's got the long hair. The beard is starting to get bushy. The fingernails are incredibly long. He wears the exact same brown corduroy jacket every single day. He just didn't care about presentation in the slightest. And the diet. Yes, he found a specific store in Brighton Beach that sold a particular type of Russian black bread. And that's what he ate, just black bread, milk and cheese. That's it. He wasn't a foodie, trying out new york restaurants. He was fueling a machine, the fingernails thing. I really want to pause on that, because it's so illustrative of how his mind works. Someone actually asked him, Gregory, why don't you cut your nails? And his answer wasn't, I forgot, or I don't care about hygiene, right? He looked at them and said, if they grow, why would I not let them grow? It's such a weirdly logical answer. It almost sounds like an alien trying to understand human grooming habits. It's completely binary. He viewed cutting his nails as an unnecessary expenditure of energy. Did cutting his nails help him understand the geometry of the universe? No, then why waste the calories picking up the clippers? He was optimizing his entire life to focus 100% of his CPU power on geometry, everything else was noise, and it worked. I mean, the output speaks for itself. During this time, he solves the soul conjecture, which was a huge deal. This is a 20 year old open problem in differential geometry. People had written entire books trying to chip away at it, and Perelman solved it in a four page paper, four pages, four pages. It was so elegant, so devastatingly concise, that the top universities in the world, Prince and Stanford, they immediately started throwing job offers at him, and this is where we see the first real refusal. The cracks in the social contract start to show. Stanford asks him for a CV, just standard HR procedure, right? And Perelman says, No. He says, if they know my work, they don't need my CV. If they need my CV, they don't know my work. That is such a flex. I mean, it's arrogant, but it's also difficult to argue with. It's the beginning of the end of his relationship with the academic world. He refuses to play the networking game. He deeply believes that merit should be entirely self evident. If he has to market himself, if he has to write a little resume to prove he's smart, when you just solve the soul conjecture, he feels the system is completely broken and insulting. So he's in America. He's brilliant. He's solving major problems, and he meets a man named Richard Hamilton.

Unknown Speaker  18:17  
And we really have to talk about Hamilton, because this is the central tragedy of the entire story, isn't it? It really is. Richard Hamilton is the other protagonist here, and he is the exact polar opposite of Perelman in every conceivable way paint the picture for us. Perelman is the monk in the corduroy jacket, eating black bread. Hamilton is Hamilton is the rock star. He's an American, brash, highly charismatic. He winds, surfs, he rides horses, he dates a string of models. He's loud and he's brilliant. He's a guy at the math conference holding court at the hotel bar at 2am and in 1982 Hamilton invented a mathematical tool called Ricci flow. Okay, Ricci flow. This is the key to the whole solution. We need a Ricci flow for dummies. Explanation. How does this work? Okay, think of it as a heat equation for geometry, imagine you have a lumpy blob of clay. It's got sharp corners, weird dents, weird protrusions, sticking out. It's an ugly, chaotic shape. Yeah. Now imagine you apply a magical kind of heat to it, okay, baking the clay, right? But in physics, heat diffuses. It spreads out evenly from hot to cold. Ricci flow does the exact same thing, but to curvature. It makes the high curvature parts, the really sharp bumps, melt down and shrink, and it makes the indented parts expand outwards. It smooths everything out mathematically, like applying a blur filter in Photoshop, but for 3d physical shapes, that is a perfect analogy. Hamilton's big idea was this, if I can take absolutely any weird, twisted, 3d shape in the universe and run this Ricci flow program on it, eventually it should smooth out into a perfect, round sphere. And if you can prove that everything eventually turns into a sphere, you've proven the Poincare conjecture. Precisely. You prove that the chaotic blob was just a sphere. In a really bad discussion.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
Eyes. Hamilton spent 25 years trying to make this work. He devoted his entire professional life to it. 25 years. That is insane, but he got stuck. He hit a massive wall, the black hole obstacle. But that sounds ominous. It is because sometimes, as the shape is smoothing out under the Ricci flow, instead of becoming a nice round ball, it develops a singularity, a pinch point. Imagine a dumbbell where the handle gets thinner and thinner and thinner until it just snaps Exactly, yeah, the curvature goes to mathematical infinity. At that point, the mass completely blows up. It's like dividing by zero. Hamilton called them cigar singularities because of their shape. He couldn't figure out how to stop them from forming, and he couldn't figure out how to handle them mathematically when they did the whole program just stalled out. But Perelman is watching all this happen. He's sitting in the audience at Hamilton's lectures in the early 90s, and he's captivated not just by the math, but by Hamilton himself. Perelman saw Hamilton as a kindred spirit. Weirdly enough, Hamilton was very open. He shared his half baked ideas before they were finished. He wasn't hoarding secrets like a lot of academics do. Perelman thought this is how a true scientist should behave. He had a massive hero crush. He did. He respected him deeply. He viewed himself as Hamilton's student in a spiritual way. So in 1996 Perelman is back in Russia. He has an incredible insight. He thinks he actually knows how to fix the singularities. So he sits down and writes a very long, very detailed letter to Richard Hamilton. He says, effectively, I think I can help you finish your life's work. Let's collaborate and silence. Yeah, Hamilton never replies, oh, we still don't really know why. Maybe he was just busy. Maybe he was proud and didn't want help. Maybe he didn't think this weird. Think this weird young Russian guy could possibly solve what he couldn't. But whatever the reason, he completely ghosted him, and that silence literally changed mathematical history. It did because Perelman didn't give up on the math, but he did change his tactics. He decided, fine, if he won't work with me, I will just do it entirely alone. He cuts off all contact with his American friends. He disappears into the Steklov Institute in St Petersburg, and for seven years, he basically vanishes off the face of the earth. Seven years, no published papers, no conferences, just him the black bread and the hardest problem in the universe. Most people in the community thought he had quit math. They thought he burned out and went crazy, but he was in the lab meticulously building a controlled destruction of the universe. So let's get into the solution. It's November, 2002 suddenly on the internet, not in a fancy peer reviewed journal, but on irks for which is just a bare bones pre print server, a paper drops, a 39 page paper. Yeah, and Perelman is so humble, or maybe so arrogant, depending on how you view it, that he doesn't even say I saw the Poincare conjecture in the title. He calls it the entropy formula for the Ricci flow in its geometric applications. That sounds like a boring technical footnote, typical Perelman. So how did he actually fix the black hole problem? How did he bypass the pinch points that ruin Hamilton's life, he did three crucial things. First, he introduced entropy to the equation. He proved that during this geometric heating process, a specific quantity always strictly increases. This was massive because it mathematically ruled out chaos. It meant the shape couldn't just wobble back and forth forever, like a pendulum. It had to be moving toward a final destination. Okay, so he gave the whole process a definitive direction, a timeline Second, and this is the most metal part of the entire proof. He used surgery. I really love that. We're calling math metal. It is. He proved that when a pinch point, a singularity, starts to form, you don't have to just stop and cry about it. You can mathematically cut the manifold. You literally snip the infinitely thin neck of the dumbbell. You cap off the open ends with perfectly smooth little hemispheres, and then bang, you just restart the flow. So he just cuts out the geometric cancer precisely. He performs surgery on the fabric of the universe. He cuts, heals the wound and restarts the clock. And the third thing he proved is finite extinction. He proved that you don't have to do this cutting and restarting forever. Eventually, after a finite number of surgeries, the whole shape dissolves entirely into nice, perfectly round spheres. Wait it dissolves. That's the deepest philosophical beauty of it. You prove the shape of the thing by watching it completely die. You burn it down with Ricci flow, you chop up the remains with surgery, and you watch it vanish. What survives the fire is the ultimate truth of the shape that is almost poetic. It's destruction as a pure form of creation or revelation. I guess it really is. And since the thing ultimately dissolves into spheres, it mathematically must have been a sphere to begin with. Poincare is finally solved. And not just Poincare. He actually solved the geometrization conjecture, which is a much, much bigger theory proposed by William Thurston that describes all possible 3d shapes. He did what Hamilton tried to do for 25 years, and he finished it flawlessly. So he posts this on the internet. Does the math world instantly.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
Freak out and throw a parade. It took a minute. Actually, the math was incredibly dense. It was so concise. He skipped dozens of intermediate steps because he just assumed the reader was a genius like him. He was like reading computer code written by a hyper advanced alien. But slowly, the email started flying around the world. Is this it did this crazy Russian actually do it? So 2003 Perelman comes back to America for a massive lecture tour to explain himself the victory lab. Right? He visits MIT Princeton, Columbia, and this leads to the moment of total, crushing disillusionment. He goes to Columbia specifically to see Richard Hamilton, the man who ghosted him seven years ago, Perelman, is giving the lecture of the century. He is explaining step by step, how he finished Hamilton's life work. He still considers himself Hamilton's loyal disciple. He wants Hamilton's approval more than anything. He wants a handshake. He wants Hamilton to look at him and say, We did it. And what does Hamilton do? He shows up late, he sits in the back of the auditorium, and when the lecture is over, he asked absolutely no questions, nothing, not a single question, nothing. He didn't engage at all. Perelman said later, I had the impression he had read only the first part of my paper. That is just devastating. It broke something fundamental in Perelman. He realized the collaboration he had dreamed of was a total fantasy. The man he admired, above all others, didn't care enough to engage with the actual truth. He saw it as a massive lack of curiosity, a lack of scientific purity. And to Perelman, if you aren't curious about the truth, why are you even calling yourself a mathematician? So he goes back to Russia, heartbroken, but now the sharks are starting to circle. The proof is out there. It's being intensely verified by three different teams of world class experts, and it takes them literally years to check it because it's so complex. And they do confirm it, it's completely correct. Yeah, but then enter the villain of the story. We have to talk about xington Yao. Xington Yao is an absolute Titan, a fields medalist, incredibly powerful, politically connected across the globe. He's basically the Emperor figure of the math world at this time. And he decides he wants a piece of this historic pie. He sees this prize, this immortal glory, and he wants his name stamped on it. Yao had two very loyal students, Cao and Zhu. He pushes them to write a paper on Perelman's proof now, usually you write an expository paper explaining someone else's proof to help normal people understand it. That's totally standard and helpful. But that's not what happened here. No, it wasn't. They published a massive paper in the Asian Journal of mathematics, and who happened to be the editor in chief of that specific journal, Sheng Tung Yao himself. And how long did the rigorous peer review process take for this groundbreaking paper? Three days they supposedly reviewed over 300 pages of the densest, most complicated math on Earth in three days. It was a complete sham. It was physically impossible to read it that fast, let alone verify it. And the abstract of the paper, the pure audacity is unbelievable. The abstract claimed this is a complete proof. The heavy implication was that Perelman's work was full of holes. It was just a loose sketch, and that they, the Chinese team, had done the real heavy lifting. They were trying to rewrite mathematical history in real time. That is a heist. That is a blatant intellectual bank robbery in broad daylight. Get so much worse. Yao holds a massive press conference in Beijing, and he literally breaks down the credit for the century's biggest discovery, like a corporate merger. He says Hamilton gets 50% credit, Perelman gets 25%

Unknown Speaker  28:35  
and the Chinese team gets 30% Wait, hold on, 50 plus 25 plus 30, that's 105%

Unknown Speaker  28:41  
yes, the running joke in the math community for years was that they were so insanely eager to steal the credit that they completely forgot how to do basic addition. But the community pushed back. Right? They didn't just let this slide. Eventually, yes, the independent mathematicians verifying the work proved that Perelman's proof was actually 100% complete. He had missed a single thing. Cal and Xu had just copied his exact arguments and filled in incredibly minor details that any grad student could have filled in. They were forced to publicly retract the paper and change the title to just Hamilton Perelman's proof. But the damage was done for Perelman, watching all this unfold from St Petersburg, this was the absolute final straw. He looked at this disgusting spectacle. He saw Yao blatantly trying to steal his life's work, but much more importantly, he saw the community being so polite about it. He saw people shaking hands with Yao at conferences, smiling, pretending it wasn't utterly repulsive. He had a great quote about this. He said, It is not people who break ethical standards, who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated. That quote is the master key to his entire psyche. He's saying you guys are the weirdos for tolerating this behavior. I'm the only normal one for thinking theft is bad. He realized that to succeed in this community, to be a famous mathematician, you actually have to be a politician.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
And you have to trade favors, tolerate massive egos and look the other way when people cheat. And he simply fundamentally refused to do it. So 2006 comes around. The Fields Medal the absolute highest honor in mathematics, the Nobel equivalent, and they want to give it to him. The president of the International Mathematical union literally flies to St Petersburg. He meets Perelman and begs him for 10 hours, 10 straight hours, to accept the prize. And Perelman looks at him and says, I do not want to be a pet in a zoo. Wow. He absolutely refused to be paraded around in a tuxedo to make the institution look good. He said, If the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed. He stripped all the external value away from the metal. It was just a piece of metal to him. And then 2010 the big one, the clay Millennium prize, $1 million in cash. This refusal was even more specific and interesting. He didn't just say, I don't want your money. He explicitly said he couldn't accept it because it was deeply unfair to Richard Hamilton. Wait really, after Hamilton brutally ghosted him, after Hamilton ignored him at his own lecture, Perelman still defended the guy. Yes, that is the terrifying level of his integrity. It's almost scary. He genuinely believed Hamilton contributed 50% to the solution, because Hamilton built the core tool, Ricci flow. The Prize Committee completely ignored Hamilton and only wanted to honor Perelman. Perelman viewed that as an unjust ruling, and he would absolutely not accept money from an unjust system. That is actually really heartbreaking. He had more loyalty and respect for Hamilton than Hamilton ever had for him. It's incredibly tragic, but it's also undeniably principled. He wasn't acting out of spite or anger. He was acting out of a rigid, mathematical sense of justice. He couldn't be bought, and he couldn't be flattered. So he walks away completely. He quits the stekloff Institute. He moves back in full time with his mom, and that brings us to today. Where is he right now? He is still in St Petersburg. He's totally unemployed. He's been spotted occasionally walking in the rain in his neighborhood, looking very disheveled, muttering to himself. He's been seen out picking mushrooms in the local forest, and when journalists ambushed him to ask what he wants, he said, I have everything I need. There's a really strong comparison to Isaac Newton here. Newton was famously obsessed, highly solitary and sometimes incredibly vindictive. Perelman is obsessed and solitary, but he's not vindictive at all. He just wants purity. He wants the pure math without the dirty politics of humanity. There is this massive, cosmic irony to the whole thing, though, that we have to mention the actual shape of the universe. Oh, this is the best final twist. Perelman proved that the simplest possible universe, a simply connected one, must be a sphere, right? If the rubber band shrinks, it's a sphere. But recent data from NASA, from the W map probe, looking at the cosmic microwave background, suggests our actual universe might not be simple at all. The data hints that we might actually live in what's called the Poincare dodecahedral space, which means what exactly, very roughly, it's shaped like a massive soccer ball. If you fly a spaceship out of one side of the universe, you re enter from the opposite side, but slightly twisted. It's finite but unbounded. So Perelman mathematically proved what the simplest universe must be. But actual physical reality might just be more complicated than that reality is under absolutely no obligation to be simple. But here's the really important thing, the tools Perelman built to solve this, the Ricci flow analysis, the surgery techniques, those exact tools are now being actively used in advanced physics to understand black holes and complex thermodynamics. He gave humanity the tools to understand the fabric of the universe, even if the specific shape turns out to be different, and yet he is totally estranged from the people using those tools. It's the ultimate sacrifice. He gave us the greatest gift imaginable, and then permanently deleted himself from the recipient list. So let's wrap this entire crazy story up. What does this all mean for us? We started with a guy living in squalor, refusing a million dollars. I think we had to look really closely at the two refusals. He refused the money. Yes, that's what made the flashy CNN headlines. But much more importantly, he refused the corruption. He stripped his own life down, exactly like He stripped the topology down. That's the metaphor that really stays with me. He used Ricci flow to smooth out the mathematical universe right to cut away the knots and the ugly singularities until only the pure perfect sphere remained. And then he turned around and did the exact same mathematical surgery to his own life. He cut away the fame, the politics, the money, the ego and what's left after all that surgery, a man picking mushrooms in a forest, a man who is entirely, completely free. We look at him and we think, Oh, how incredibly sad he's all alone in a crumbling apartment. But perhaps he looks at us running on our endless hamster wheels, chasing likes, chasing promotions, tolerating lies and theft just to get ahead. And he.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
Thinks we are the ones who are completely lost. He said, I know how to control the universe. Maybe he wasn't talking about outer space. Maybe he meant his own universe. Exactly. He completely controls his universe because he requires absolutely nothing from it. He is the only person on earth who truly cannot be bought. Poincare wrote all those years ago, this question would take us too far. It took us to the absolute edge of human knowledge, and it took Perelman to the absolute edge of human ethics. And frankly, looking at the state of the world today, I don't think he fell off the edge at all. I think he's the only one standing on solid ground that is a deeply powerful thought to leave on. But I want to give you, the listener, one final thing to mull over. We think of mathematics as this purely abstract pursuit of numbers and shapes. But what if Perelman's final, greatest proof wasn't mathematical at all? What if his complete isolation is a sociological proof, a proof that in order to maintain absolute, uncorrupted ethical truth, the human variable has to be eliminated completely. You might not ever turn down a million dollars, but ask yourself, What are you tolerating in your own life that you shouldn't be a completely terrifying question for the ages. That's it for this deep dive. Thanks so much for listening. Keep thinking.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai