Grigori Perelman

According to media reports in 2010, Grigori Perelman lives with his elderly mother in a 2-bedroom flat in St. Petersburg despite owning his own studio flat. The family is sustained by his mother’s modest pension and the money sent by his sister who lives in Sweden.

Grigori ‘Grisha’ Yakovlevich Perelman was born on June 13, 1966 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia) to Yakov Perelman and Lubov Lvovna. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother was a teacher of mathematics at a technical college.

He was born to Russian-Jewish parents at a time when Soviet distrust of Jews was strong, and his overtly Jewish surname made him suffer anti-Semitism throughout his life. His father later moved to Israel and his mother left graduate work in mathematics to raise him and his younger sister Elena, who also became a mathematician later.

His father, who was very proud of him, used to encourage him to solve brain teasers and math problems when he was a child, and taught him to play chess. His mother also contributed to his interest in mathematics, and also taught him to play the violin.

By the time he was ten, his talent in mathematics became obvious after he participated in district mathematics competitions. To help develop his talents further, his mother enrolled him into an elite math coaching club run by Sergei Rukshin, a 19-year-old mathematics undergraduate at Leningrad University.

With Rukshin’s help, he also improved his English and entered Leningrad's Special Mathematics and Physics School Number 239 in September 1980. In 1982, he was selected into Soviet Union’s International Mathematical Olympiad team, where he earned a gold medal and secured a direct entry into School of Mathematics and Mechanics at the Leningrad State University.

During his undergraduate year, Grigori Perelman began assisting his former tutor Sergei Rukshin at his summer camps. However, he had to stop eventually as his incredibly high standards were no match for even the best students.

By the time he graduated from university in 1987, he had already published a bunch of papers on various mathematical theories. These included ‘Realization of abstract k-skeletons as k-skeletons of intersections of convex polyhedra in R2k-1’, ‘A remark on Helly's theorem’, a supplement to A D Aleksandrov's ‘On the foundations of geometry’, and ‘On the k-radii of a convex body’.

Despite his remarkable achievements in the undergraduate level, he found it difficult to get into the Leningrad Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics because the institute did not accept Jews following an old policy. In 1990, a letter from Aleksandr Danilovic Aleksandrov to the director of the institute allowed him to pursue his graduate work there, even though under Yuri Burago instead of Aleksandrov himself.

He had already published the results of his thesis ‘An example of a complete saddle surface in R4 with Gaussian curvature bounded away from zero’ in 1989. The following year, he defended his thesis ‘Saddle Surfaces in Euclidean Spaces’.

With Burago’s efforts, he was invited into the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques near Paris by Mikhael Leonidovich Gromov with whom he worked on Aleksandrov's spaces. In 1992, he published his first major paper, ‘A D Aleksandrov spaces with curvatures bounded below’ in collaboration with Burago and Gromov.

Grigori Perelman proved the soul conjecture in 1994 and Thurston's geometrization conjecture in 2003 (confirmed in 2006). He is best known for his work in comparison theorems in Riemannian geometry and for proving the Poincaré conjecture.