IN NOVEMBER 2002, an obscure Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman caused a sensation in the mathematical community when he posted the first in a series of papers proving the most famous unsolved problem in topology: the Poincaré conjecture. He caused another sensation four years later when he was awarded the Fields medal - the "mathematics Nobel" - for his work, declined to accept it, and then left mathematics altogether. When last heard of, he was living a reclusive existence at his mother's home in St Petersburg
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