Article on Perelman in The New Yorker

Catalin Turc pointed me to this article in The New Yorker on Grigory Perelman, who this week declined a Fields Medal for proving the Poincaré conjecture. (Nobody had previously declined a Fields Medal.)

The article is very long but very interesting, and I recommend it highly; it is excellent. The author is Sylvia Nassar, who wrote the book A Beautiful Mind on John Nash on which the movie of the same title (which is an excellent movie) was based.

Shing-Tung Yau, an extremely famous mathematician, is portrayed as a total dick in this story. I've never met him, and I obviously fall beneath the notice of most such people anyway, but he's done some pretty ugly things if the allegations are true.