Turning math into money
Mathematician Richard Hamilton was named a co-winner of the 2011 Shaw Prize for Mathematical Sciences. The honor comes with a $500K check. Hamilton is best known as the architect of the Ricci flow, a mathematical process that formed the foundation of Grisha Perelman’s 2006 proof of the Poincaré conjecture. Perelman turned down the Fields medal in 2006 and $1 million in 2010. He told Interfax, the Russian news agency:
It’s organized opposition to the mathematical community. I do not like their decisions, I think they are unfair. I think that the contribution to the solution of this problem by U.S. mathematician Hamilton is no less than mine.
I wrote about Hamilton, the Shaw Prize, and the Perelman incident for New Scientist. Read the article here.