Pygmalion Books is hereby issuing a triple dog dare to any scientist, scholar or theorist (etc.) active within an experimental discipline. The dare is simple. We are asking that you consider publishing one of your forthcoming works, on whichever subject it is that fascinates you, with us. It doesn't matter to us if you're choosing to do this as a reflexive gesture made against the capitalist publishing apparatus or not.

Furthermore, we will not field any argumentative requests made against this dare. For those who would like to debate the merits of publishing important experimental works in this manner, we invite you to research the events — not excluding the guerrilla publishing tactics involved — that culminated in Grigori Perelman's avant-garde rejection of the Fields Medal.[1]

The most comedic example of the academic drama created by Perelman can be found in a Guardian Unlimited article by James Randerson.[2] Here we are confronted with an assortment of academic rodeo clowns who seem intent on revealing themselves as perfect expressions of the class division. For your reading pleasure, we have picked out the best fragments in this article, which is filled to the brim with a sort of tragicomic feigning of incredulity over Perelman's revolutionary gesture. For the academic protestors' parts, it's clear that Perelman's well placed spit had not quite been wiped off their faces at the time of questioning. The shock expressed by these superbureaucrats of official knowledge separation is a perfect representation of the revolutionary potential in Perelman's dialectical gambit. He did not attend their ceremonies and declined to accept their medals and their form of wealth, making him the first person in history to subvert the Fields Medal in such a way.

FRAGMENTS

He has said he will refuse a $1m prize offered by a private maths research institute in the US that would be his if his claim is proved correct.

And upper echelons of the maths world are buzzing with rumours that even if he is offered the gong he will not accept it.

He has also refused a major European maths prize, supposedly on the grounds that he did not believe the committee awarding the prize was sufficiently qualified to judge his work.

"I think he's a very unconventional person. He's against being involved in pageantry and idolatry," said Arthur Jaffe at Harvard University.

"But he carries it to extreme which people might describe as a little crazy."

Little is known about Dr Perelman, who refuses to talk to the media.

"He placed the papers on the web archive and basically said 'that's it'," Prof Hitchin said.

In 2000, the Clay Institute in Boston, a private maths research organisation, established seven "millennium problems", each with a million-dollar reward for a solution.

The Poincaré conjecture is one, but Dr Perelman has said he is not interested in the money.

"There are all sorts of jokes going round the community that having a million dollars in St Petersburg is quite dangerous," Prof Hitchin said.

No one is quite sure what will happen if the Russian spurns the medal.

"If he were to win it and turn it down it would be slightly insulting," said Prof Du Sautoy.

But it seems unlikely that Dr Perelman, who recently relinquished his academic position, will care much about offending his peers.

"He has sort of alienated himself from the maths community," Prof Du Sautoy added.

"He has become disillusioned with mathematics, which is quite sad."

"He's not interested in money."

"The big prize for him is proving his theorem."


Notes

1. "Maths 'Nobel' prize declined by Russian recluse," Nature News, August 2006
2. "Meet the cleverest man in the world (who's going to say no to a $1m prize)," Guardian Unlimited, August 2006