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Perelman Urged To Accept $1m Prize
krou writes "The Warm Home charity in St. Petersburg, Grigory Perelman's home-town, has urged the math genius and recluse to accept the $1m Millennium Prize for solving the Poincaré conjecture, and donate it to charities. Perelman has refused to accept the award, telling one reporter through the closed door of his flat, 'I have all I want,' and another who managed to call him on his mobile, 'You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms.'"
Why's that? I have a lot of respect for the math he did, but I really don't see him as heroic.
He doesn't have to accept the million he can say "award it to so and so" and be done with it. The man is smart but he is no genius ethically, there is so much suffering in the world. Anyone with a brain would find some way to circulate that money to where it is needed in the world. It's not going to save the world but reducing the suffering in the world IMHO should be among the top goals of any intellectual worth his or her salt.
Fuck off.
It's *his* prize and *his* money. *He* can do whatever the hell he wants with it. It's *his* money. As the Russian minister said, and I'm paraphrasing, it is not decent to count others money in their pockets.
Not anyone. He does not speak to reporters and paparazzis which have taken him as a attention monger actors.
A few Chinese mathematicians tried to downplay his work and advertise their own work instead and he did not expected to see such dirty behaviors in scientific community.
I myself went back to university to become a scientist because I could not bear politics in business environments. I went to academics because I thought there is more ethics there.
Now about Chinese. They have conquered scientific journals as editors and reviewers. Now they invent theories (sometimes false, sometimes terrible in quality) and they send those craps to conquered journals. They have conquered the whole scientific publishing chain and they do whatever unethical things you may think of.