Grigory Perelman did better. He was awarded a Millennium Prize of $1 million in March 2010 for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture, which states that “every simply connected, closed, 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere.” If you think that summary is hard to understand, just try to figure out the proof. The original submitted proof had arrived many years earlier, in a series of papers from 2002 and 2003, but again, at first no one was sure if he had succeeded. (By the way, Perelman eventually turned down the prize, saying he didn’t want money or fame.)
