Der Beweis des Jahrhunderts

In 2000, the Clay Institute offered a million-dollar prize for solving seven Millennium Problems in mathematics, including the Poincaré Conjecture. Two years later, Grigori Perelman, an eccentric Russian-Jewish mathematician, provided the proof but famously rejected the prize money and retreated from public life.

This book explores why this Leningrad prodigy, a winner of the International Mathematical Olympiad, was uniquely able to solve the problem. Through interviews with his peers, teachers, and colleagues, a portrait emerges of a man whose almost superhuman intellectual rigor enabled his mathematical breakthroughs but also increasingly alienated him from the world.