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Sometimes the news isn't about politics or global security, but about the strange and surreal goings-on of a man refusing millions of dollars, ghosts allegedly engaging in intercourse and a digital pop star. These are the top 10 odd news stories of 2011, as ranked by their popularity on UPI.com.
Math genius explains $1M prize refusal
Grigory Perelman, the Russian math whiz who solved a century-old problem, said he refused a $1 million prize because he knows "how to control the universe." The money was offered to Perelman by the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Mass. in 2010 for his accomplishment in proving the conjecture proposed by Henri Poincare in 1904 on how three-spheres are the only possible bounded three-dimensional spaces to contain no holes.

Perelman, who lives in poverty with his mother according to neighbors, said that if he knew how to control the universe, "why should [he] run for a million?" Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

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