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Math genius explains $1M prize refusal

Grigori Perelman in 1993, courtesy of George M. Bergman via Wikimedia Commons.

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ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, April 29 (UPI) -- 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."

Perelman, 43, of St. Petersburg told the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda he had no reason to accept the $1 million prize the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Mass., offered him in 2010 for proving the Poincare conjecture, RIA Novosti reported Friday.

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"Emptiness is everywhere and it can be calculated, which gives us a great opportunity ... I know how to control the universe. So tell me, why should I run for a million?" Perelman said.

Perelman, a reclusive mathematician who neighbors say lives in poverty with his mother, presented proofs in 2002 and 2003 proving the conjecture proposed by Henri Poincare in 1904. The conjecture suggested three-spheres are the only possible bounded three-dimensional spaces to contain no holes.

"I learned how to calculate voids, along with my colleagues we know the mechanisms for filling in the social and economic voids," he said.

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