Perfect Rigor by Masha Gessen

Author:Masha Gessen [Gessen, Masha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-03-23T00:47:28+00:00

Perelman's term as a Miller Fellow ended in the spring of 1995. His paper on the Soul Conjecture had come out the previous year, and he had spoken at the International Congress of Mathematicians, so it is not surprising that even though he put no effort into securing an academic position after Berkeley, he was courted by several leading institutions. He turned all of them down, and the way he did it—specifically, the way he rejected Princeton—has become part of American and Russian mathematical lore. I had heard about it on both sides of the Atlantic before I asked one of the immediate part ici pants what had happened, and his account differed little from what I had been told.

Peter Sarnak, a Princeton professor who became chair of the mathematics department in 1996, first heard of Perelman from Gromov, who, Sarnak recalled in an e-mail message, had said Perelman was "exceptionally good." In the winter of 1994–1995, Perelman came to Princeton to give a talk on his proof of the Soul Conjecture. Few people showed up, but the math department's brass was there: distinguished professor John Mather, then-department chair Simon Kochen, and Sarnak all attended. Perelman gave a great lecture: clear, precise, and engaging—probably because his personal relationship with the Soul Conjecture had been brief and satisfying and was resolved. "After the lecture the three of us approached Perelman saying we would like to arrange for him to come to Princeton as an assistant professor," recalled Sarnak. Legend has it—though Sarnak did not remember it—that at this point Perelman asked why they would want to bring him to Princeton when no one there was interested in his areas of research—an impression perhaps intensified by the nearly empty auditorium and which, Sarnak acknowledged, was an accurate reflection of the situation, "which we were eager to change." Sarnak remembered Perelman making clear "that he wanted a tenured position, to which we responded that we would have to look into that and in any case we need some information from him such as a CV. He was surprised by the latter, saying something like 'you have heard my lecture, why would you need any more information?' Given that he wasn't interested in a tenure track position we didn't pursue this any further. History has proven that we made a mistake in not being more aggressive in recruiting him."

Perelman told several people at the time that he would settle for nothing less than immediate tenure—an audacious position for a twenty-nine-year-old mathematician with few publications and only a semester's worth of teaching experience. But Perelman's own logic was impeccable. He was not out looking for work, so the job offers were coming from institutions—or, rather, people—who, as Cheeger put it, "knew how terrific he was." In other words, they knew what Perelman and Gromov knew: that he was the best in the world. Why, then, would they want to put him through the conventional paces of earning his full professorship? Why even make him submit

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