The Math Genuis Grigori Grisha Perelman!
In 2000, the world’s leading mathematicians gathered in Paris to identify seven of the most important unsolved problems in their field. The non-profit Clay Mathematics Institute organized the meeting and pledged $1 million to the first person to solve any of the seven Millennium Problems.
So far, only one has been solved: French mathematician Henri Poincaré’s 1904 problem about the nature of space. Poincaré suggested that a three-dimensional space with no holes can be made into a sphere without ripping or cutting it. However, he believed his conjecture to be true but couldn’t prove it. His conjecture was generalized to any number of dimensions, including four dimensions, which was particularly challenging to solve.
In 2002, a mysterious paper floated on the internet; within this paper was a solution to the Poincaré conjecture. The author was Russian mathematician Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman, known as Grisha. Grisha grew up in the Soviet Union and attended an elite high school in St. Petersburg, specializing in math. At 16, he won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad with a perfect score. Being part of the Soviet Olympiad team allowed him to bypass the university’s discriminatory admission quota. After completing his studies, he did graduate work at the renowned Steklov Mathematical Institute’s St. Petersburg branch, unheard of for a Jew. Influential…
