Grisha is a 40-year old recluse living in St. Petersburg with his mother. His proof of the Poincaré conjecture is the greatest mathematical achievement of recent times. They want to give him the maths equivalent of the Nobel prize (the Fields medal) but he so far declines to come to Madrid to receive it.

 

Telegraph.co has this profile, with a couple of snapshots. He looks like a nice modest person, perhaps a bit shy.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/20/nmaths20.xml

 

The New Yorker is rumored to be coming out with a long piece on Grisha written by the author of "A Beautiful Mind"

(Sylvia Nasar, she obviously has a thing about mathematicians )

So far that is just hearsay, and there is no indication when the piece might appear.

I just heard from someone in St Petersburg that Sylvia Nasar was already in SPb in June doing research for the New Yorker article----and probably spying on Grisha if not actually interviewing him.

 

The article is actually in THIS WEEK'S edition (dated 28 August)

 

the table of contents says

 

"Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber

Manifold Destiny

Who really solved the Poincaré conjecture?"

 

it's a triple pun because of Manifest Destiny and the fact that it is a complicated issue who proved the Poinc with lots of different people and manifold story-lines

and because it is about a theorem in differential geometry, about diffy MANIFOLDS which is the technical name for smooth surfaces and their higher dimensional analogs.

 

Hats off to Sylvia Nasar.

 

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here is the schedule of the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians (Madrid).

http://www.icm2006.org/onlineevents

It is starting tomorrow Tuesday 22 August and there will be online media at this site.

 

the schedule has 4 plenary talks scheduled by UN-NAMED Field medalist speakers

 

there is a question if Grisha will be one, or if someone will speak for him in his place.