Imagine getting a phone call to tell you that you’ve just been awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in your field, and it comes with a million dollar purse. What would you do? Slam down the receiver?

That’s exactly what Grigory ‘Gisha’ Perelman did (or rather would have done if anyone could get a hold of his phone number, it is far more likely that he just didn’t respond to his e-mail). Perelman is the reclusive Russian mathematician who solved the century-old Poincaré conjecture, which until recently was one of the biggest outstanding problems in mathematics.

For his efforts, the Clay Mathematics Institute wanted to give Perelman one of its millennium prizes, which it gives out to those lucky few who can lick the toughest maths problems of the day. Bur Perelman has apparently refused the prize. Those who know him won’t bash an eyelid: He’s already failed to show up for the Fields medal, pretty much the Nobel prize of mathematics, and an award from the European Congress of Mathematics for work he did in the1990s.

This time things might have been different, mainly because there was real cash to be won. The Clay prize comes with US$1 million, no small sum for any mortal, let alone a man who is living off a staff researcher’s salary at the St. Petersburg branch of the Steklov Mathematical Institute.

Bu then again Perelman has never been in it for the money. “We tried to take him to a nice restaurant in Boston,” Tom Mrowka, a mathematician at MIT, told Nature of a 2002 visit from Perelman. “I think he’d rather have had his bortsch.”

Incidentally, that 2002 feature by Emily Singer has the only semi-coherent explanation that I’ve ever read of what Perelman actually did to win all this acclaim. It has also got some really interesting colour about the man himself (why is it that geniuses never cut their fingernails?).

There’s also a more recent book by Perelman, which we reviewed earlier this year.