Terence Tao on Grigori Perelman declining the Fields Medal
00:00:00.000 | There's a funny story I read that when you won the Fields Medal, somebody from the internet wrote
00:00:04.420 | you and asked, you know, what are you going to do now that you've won this prestigious award?
00:00:08.560 | And then you just quickly, very humbly said that, you know, this
00:00:12.160 | shiny medal is not going to solve any of the problems I'm currently working on.
00:00:15.620 | So I'm just going to keep working on them. First of all, it's funny to me that you would answer
00:00:19.980 | an email in that context. It just shows your humility. But anyway, it's another way for me
00:00:24.520 | to ask about Gregorio Perlman. What do you think about him famously declining the Fields Medal
00:00:30.060 | and the Millennial Prize, which came with a $1 million of prize money? He stated that I'm not
00:00:35.960 | interested in money or fame. The prize is completely irrelevant for me. If the proof is correct, then
00:00:42.080 | no other recognition is needed. He's somewhat of an outlier, even among mathematicians who tend to have
00:00:47.240 | somewhat idealistic views. I've never met him. I'd be interested to meet him one day, but I'd never
00:00:51.300 | had the chance. He's always had strong views about certain things. It's not like he was completely
00:00:54.220 | isolated from the math community. I mean, he would give talks and write papers and so forth. But at
00:00:58.480 | some point, he just decided not to engage with the rest of the community. He was disillusioned.
00:01:02.140 | And he decided to peace out and, you know, collect mushrooms in St. Petersburg or something. And that's
00:01:06.100 | fine. You can do that. He hasn't published since in this field, but that's fine. There's many,
00:01:10.280 | many other people who've done so as well. I guess one thing I didn't realize initially with the Fields Medal
00:01:14.300 | is that it sort of makes you part of the establishment. Most mathematicians,
00:01:17.280 | you know, there's career mathematicians, you know, you just focus on publishing your next paper,
00:01:20.440 | maybe getting one test to promote one rank and starting a few projects, maybe taking some
00:01:24.820 | students or something. Yeah. But then suddenly people want your opinion on things and you have
00:01:28.900 | to think a little bit about, you know, things that you might just so foolishly say because you know,
00:01:32.320 | no one's going to listen to you. So it's more important now.
00:01:34.160 | This is where I would probably say that I like the Fields Medal. It does inspire a lot of young
00:01:39.380 | people somehow. This is just how human brains work.
00:01:42.100 | Yeah.
00:01:42.580 | At the same time, I also want to give sort of respect to somebody like Gregorio Perlman, who
00:01:47.300 | is critical of awards in his mind. Those are his principles and any human that's able for their
00:01:53.180 | principles to like do the thing that most humans would not be able to do. It's beautiful to see.
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