As a kid, I was constantly harassed to "show my work" in completing long division and other math equations. Math is not my cup of anything, and to this day I remain a total science end-user -- I don't care (for the most part) how you got it done . . . just do it.
All the while there's been this mother of all unsolvable math problems known as the Poincaré conjecture sitting out there for about 100 years. This thing is so unbelievably complex, I think it's best to just borrow the newspaper's description to say that it's "about the nature of space."
So, the conjecture sits there unresolved since its inception in 1904. That is until now . . .
It seems a mysterious Russian mathematician named Grigory Perelman has adequately completed the work to resolve the math puzzler.
In 2003, Perelman submitted his solution to a Massachusetts-based institute that offered $1 million to the person who could untangle the problem.
The Mass. group is now finished looking at Perelman's work, and they are ready to supply him with an oversized novelty check worth a mill. But Perelman is a no-show.
He turned in nearly 1,000 pages of work . . . many think he has a lock on the math version of the Nobel Prize . . . he has already earned himself a million . . . and he hasn't been seen or heard from since.
Something just doesn't add up here . . .
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