Perelman, Grigori Yakovlevich
Perelman, Grigori Yakovlevich,
1966–, Russian mathematician. After doing graduate work in the late 1980s for his Candidate of Science degree from Leningrad State Univ. (now St. Petersburg State Univ.), he worked as a researcher at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, St. Petersburg, and held postdoctorate positions at several U.S. universities in the early 1990s. In 1995 he returned to the Steklov Institute. In 2002–3 Perelman posted three papers on the Internet that sketched a proof of the Poincaré conjecture, a fundamental question in topologytopology,branch of mathematics, formerly known as analysis situs, that studies patterns of geometric figures involving position and relative position without regard to size.
..... Click the link for more information. . Building on and refining the insights of U.S. mathematician Richard Hamilton, Perelman proved both Henri PoincaréPoincaré, Jules Henri
, 1854–1912, French mathematician, physicist, and author. He was from 1881 connected with the faculty of sciences at the Univ. of Paris.
..... Click the link for more information. 's conjecture (1904) that all closed, simply connected three-dimensional manifolds (mathematical spaces) are topologically equivalent to a three-dimensional sphere and the broader Thurston geometrization conjecture. Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal (2006) and the Clay Mathematics Institute Millenium Prize (2010) for his work, both of he refused. After 2003 the unconventional Perelman increasingly withdrew from academic work; he resigned from the Steklov Institute in 2006.
Bibliography
See studies by D. O'Shea (2007) and M. Gessen (2009).