Mathematician turns down $1 million prize for proving the Poincare conjecture

Washington Post : A reclusive Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, who three months ago was awarded the Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize for proving the Poincaré conjecture, yesterday turned down the award and the $1 million prize. Perelman, who quit his job at the Steklov Institute and lives with his elderly mother in St. Petersburg, has in the past turned down a number of other mathematics awards, including the most prestigious of all, the Fields medal.

Proving the Poincaré conjecture is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems posed in 2000 by the Clay Institute. Of the six that remain unsolved, two are of direct relevance to physics: Yang–Mills existence and mass gap and Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness .