Happy Birthday Grigori (wherever you are)

hmmm… I'm not sure I ever thought of reclusive, brilliant mathematician Grigori Perelman (whose birthday it is today) as "adorable"… but somebody does:

http://xinvogue.blogspot.com/2014/06/mathematics-being-this-romantic-thing.html

[If you wish to watch the video with English subtitles, click on the cc/captions button.]

Not Exactly Avatar...

Reclusive Russian genius mathematician and Fields winner (and snubber-of-$1 million award) Grigori Perelman is to be the subject of a James Cameron movie according to various reports:

http://rt.com/art-and-culture/news/hollywood-mathematician-grigory-perelman-720/

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4990

Says a cautious Peter Woit:

"I’m finding it hard to figure out how Hollywood will dramatize the story of reclusively thinking about the Ricci-flow equations for seven years or so. I guess it will all be in the special effects, for which Cameron is famous."

Wednesday Math Miscellany

There are plenty of mathematical blog posts that are so advanced and beyond my comprehension they simply leave me in their dust. Then, for some reason, there are other posts, equally incomprehensible to me, that nonetheless catch my fancy and somehow capture my interest. Here is one such recent post from Peter Woit (centered around "octonions"):

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3665

On a different subject, here is a recent article on Millenium Prize winner/refuser Grigori Perelman:

http://english.pravda.ru/science/tech/28-04-2011/117727-Grigori_Perelman-0/

In Further News...

Eccentric, reclusive mathematician/genius Grigori Perelman was (not-too-unexpectedly) a no-show in Paris this week to pick up his $1 million Millennium Prize for proving the Poincare Conjecture. Read all about it:

http://tinyurl.com/y9gcxrq

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3005