by Masha Gessen
First published 2013
Grigori Perelman sits in his St. Petersburg apartment, having just accomplished what mathematicians thought impossible. He has cracked the Poincare conjecture, a topological puzzle that stumped brilliant minds for over a century. The Clay Institute will award him one million dollars. He plans to refuse it. Journalist Masha Gessen tracks down Perelman's former teachers, classmates, and colleagues across Russia and America to understand this mathematical genius who walked away from glory. She discovers a mind of extraordinary computational power, capable of pursuing abstract concepts to their furthest logical conclusions. But this same intellectual gift becomes Perelman's curse. When the messy realities of academic politics, professional jealousies, and human rivalries invade his pure mathematical world, his brilliant mind cannot process the chaos. He retreats first from mathematics, then from human contact altogether. Gessen reveals how genius can become its own prison.
Genres: 20th-century, non-fiction, biography-memoir, mathematics, 21st-century, academia
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: intellectual-protagonist, retreat-from-society
Setting: Russia, St. Petersburg
Period: 20th Century, 21st Century
321 pages · Hardcover · Suhrkamp Verlag