“Who is the greatest mathematician that ever lived?” When you research a controversial question such as this , you will come across some lists.
For example, Pythagoras is in those lists...
Because he is one of the first people to say that the shape of the world is not flat.
There is Hypatia, and her fame has even increased after the movie "Agora", which tells her story.
We vaguely remember Gauss from school years.
But still, for some reason, mathematicians are not as famous as physicists.
Even in the Nobel Prizes, while the brightest category is physics, there is not even a category called mathematics.
That's why there was a need to devise an award, Fields Medal, which is seen as the Nobel Prize in mathematics, but I ask you, how many of you have heard of the Fields medal?
We hear about Isaac Newton a lot, even the folks on the street knows Einstein, but if I say mathematician George Cantor, who knows him?

I attribute this to the fact that mathematics is a very difficult language to understand.
Mathematics seems different from everything else in this universe to me.
To understand this universe, mathematicians do not need the experimental equipment used by physicists, the huge telescopes of astrophysicists, the particle collider tunnels that extend for kilometers underground, the million-dollar laboratories of theoretical physicists, etc.
With just a paper and a pen, they solve the problems in the purest, clearest and precisest way possible.
Yet we just look at it.
We can't even understand the question, let alone solving it.

Mathematics is such a language that very few people in the world can speak that language.

I guess that's why we don't recognize the names in the list of the world's top 10 mathematicians, which include Gauss and Pythagoras etc.
However, they have such interesting stories.
Look, only two of the 10 people on this list are alive.
One of those two people is considered the most genius mathematician alive, according to objective evaluations.
He really is, and I want to tell you his story in another video.
But in my opinion, subjectively, the other one is a much more interesting mathematician.

Both were awarded the Fields Medal, which is considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics.
But he refused to take it.
Only one of the 7 most difficult mathematical problems, called millennium prize problems, has been solved so far, and as you can guess, he solved it.
But among the hundreds of mathematicians attending the award ceremony, the only seat that was empty, was the one reserved for him.
He did not attend the ceremony and also refused to accept the $1 million prize.
There is no movie made about him.
There are no documentaries except for a short production in Russian.
There isn't even a decent photo of him.
This is the only book written about him and even the person who wrote it didn't see him.
I said he is one of the two greatest mathematicians currently alive, but we are not even sure whether he is alive or not.

So who is this mathematician?
How did he solve the most difficult problem?
And then why did he severed his contact with the whole world?
What happened to this most interesting mathematician alive?

These are Millennium prize problems…
They re called the 7 most difficult math problems of the 1000 years.
A bounty of $1 million was placed on each of them by the Clay Mathematics Institute.
Million for the Millennium!
Whichever you solve, a million dollars are guaranteed.


Birch and the Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture
Hodge Conjecture
Navier-Stokes Equation
P vs NP
Riemann Hypothesis
Yang-Mills Theory and the Mass Problem
Poincaré Conjecture

We may not even be able to understand these questions throughout our lives, let alone find solutions.
Each problem requires a separate career.
There are even some who spent 20-30 years to solve them.
Still, they don't have enough time to find the solution.

Sir Andrew Wiles, who solved the mathematical problem known as Fermat's Last Theorem, 357 years after it was posed in 1637, once said:
“We don't know when or if ever these problems will be solved.
We can wait 5 years or 100 years for this..."

The world of mathematics entered the 2000s, the new millennium, with such a great challenge.
And only one person found the solution to just one of these 7 problems, after only 2 years.

Yes, this person is Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman.
I call him "Mysterious Grigori" so that I can remember his name more easily.

Before moving on to why He is mysterious, let's try to understand why the problem He solved is important.
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Researched and Written by: Ögetay Kayalı
Edited by: Alperen Çatak
Edited and Presented by: Barış Özcan
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Full text of the video and sources used:
https://barisozcan.com