Perelman says no to Fields Medal

Further to the discussion of prizes as motivators to innovation in the stem cell and energy fields, note that Russian Grigory Perelman, who published an outline of a proof for the Poincare conjecture back in 2003, has turned down the Fields Medal.

Separately, the Poincare conjecture is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems listed by the Clay Mathematics Institute, with a million dollar bounty offered for a solution. It is considered to be one of the most important questions in topology - the study of the nature of geometric structures.