It takes guts for a young Russian to stride into the heart of the US mathematical establishment after claiming to have solved a problem that has baffled the discipline's finest minds for decades. But by the time that Grigory 'Grisha' Perelman, a 30-something recluse, arrived to talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in April 2003, it was clear that there was some substance behind his bravura. Five months before, in a posting on the Internet, Perelman claimed to have proved the geometrization conjecture, a theory crucial for understanding three-dimensional surfaces. This would automatically prove the more famous Poincare conjecture, which has stumped mathematicians for 100 years. The world's top mathematicians had tried to pick holes in his argument ― and although their job was far from complete, they already suspected that Perelman wasonto something big.
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