The general verdict on Grigory Perelman, the Russian mathematician awarded a million dollar prize for solving one of the great mathematical mysteries, the Poincare conjecture, but now refusing to take it, is that he's bonkers. He's rejecting the money despite the fact that he's out of work, and living with his mother in a humble flat in St Petersburg where the only income's her pension. In what the newspaper claims is an exclusive interview, he told the Sunday Telegraph that he didn't believe in such interviews. "I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest," he announced. "Newspapers should be more discerning over who they write about. They should have more taste."
The Sunday Telegraph seems to think this is confirmation of Perelman's bonkers rating. Yet that newspaper, among others, would do well to learn from it. Its glossy mag for women, Stella, contains a fulsome interview with the actor Kate Hudson, daughter of Goldie Hawn, in which, as the paper puts it, "The star of 'You, Me and Dupree' tells Strawberry Saroyan why, for the sake of her marriage, she's happy to pay the dutiful wife off set". "Hudson", Strawberry gushes, "becomes rhapsodic on the subject of marriage and motherhood. 'I think when you're sitting next to the man you love and the man you've chosen to have kids with and then you see so much of each other in that baby - there's a much stronger connection between Chris and me now than there was before.' "
It seems on the face of it not much worse than many such celebrity interviews in nearly all newspapers, in which stars required by their studios to publicise their new movies pour out torrents of drivel to gullible newspaper people. But in this case it needs to be read in conjunction with a modest note on page 2 of the Telegraph: "The interview with Kate Hudson in ... Stella magazine went to press before she announced last week that she and her husband, Chris Robinson, had separated".
What was it the honest, if reputably bonkers, Perelman said? "I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest... Newspapers should be more discerning over who they write about. They should have more taste." When the International Congress of Mathematicians at its meeting in Madrid on Tuesday pays tribute to Perelman's historic achievement, it ought to add an accolade for that edict too.
