Fields medal for Grigory Perelman

Grigory Perelman is one of four mathematicians to win the Fields Medal for 2006, honored for his progress in proving the Poincaré conjecture. However, he has refused the award. A notorious recluse, he has refused other mathematics prizes, refused job offers from Princeton and Stanford, and said he'd refuse the $1 million prize from the Clay Institute for a proof of the conjecture.

What's the OA connection? Here's how I put it Sunday on the PLoS Blog, where Chris Surridge had anticipated that Perelman would win this year's Fields Medal.

There's another peculiarity in Perelman's way of sharing his results. As you note, he's posted his three papers to arXiv [one, two, three] and benefited from its form of open review. But to date he's refused to publish the same papers in peer-reviewed journals. The problem is not that a conventional journal would refuse them, at least now that consensus is building that his proof is sound. Steven Krantz, editor of The Journal of Geometric Analysis, has offered to publish Perelman's three papers or any new ones that he would like to submit, but Perelman has not accepted the offer. (See my blog postings on this here and here.)

Perelman is not just saying, by his actions, that open review suffices. If that were all, he could still accept conventional publication for whatever increment of authority it would bring e.g. for mathematicians who are waiting for the imprimatur of a peer-reviewed journal. He's apparently saying that there is no such increment of authority and that he doesn't care to persuade mathematicians who think there is.

On second thought, it's just as likely that his refusal to publish in a peer-reviewed journal is of a piece with his refusal of prizes, money, and prestigious jobs. It may have more to do with temperament than principle; and if there's a principle here, it may have more to do with honors than peer review.

In any case, his work on the Poincaré conjecture may be the most important work yet disseminated through preprints in an OA repository and never submitted for formal publication.

For an earlier example of important mathematics taking place on an OA preprint server --also on the Poincaré conjecture-- see my short article in SOAN for April 2002.

Congratulations to Perelman and his three co-winners, Andrei Okounkov of Princeton, Terence Tao of the University of California, and Wendelin Werner of the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay.