Life After Poincaré: A Grigori Perelman Story

He has been called "the cleverest man in the world" and shook academia to its foundations when he announced that he had solved a fiendish mathematical problem that had baffled the planet's best brains for a century.

Yet Grigory Perelman, a 43 year-old Russian mathematician, has spurned plaudits and wealth to subsist like a hermit.

He lives in a two-bedroom flat with his elderly mother in a dilapidated Soviet-era tower block in St Petersburg and last week he proved again - in spectacular fashion - that he rejects society's norms.

Picking up the telephone, the bearded genius, who is jobless, found himself being offered an academic prize worth $US1million.

He politely but tersely told the American institute offering it that he would have to consider whether he wanted to accept the money or not.

"He said he would let me know at some point," said Jim Carlson, the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute. "He did not give a sense of timing but I do not expect it will be tomorrow.

"It is not every day that a person even entertains turning down a million dollars."

The Russian has refused high honours before. In 2006, he was offered and declined the Fields Medal, the mathematical world's equivalent of a Nobel Prize. He said he was "not interested in money or fame" and did not want "everybody looking at me like I'm a creature in a zoo".

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