Purest of the Purists: The Puzzling Case of Grigori Perelman

In November 2002, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman posted the first of three short preprints to the arXiv (an online repository for drafts of academic papers in math and science), offering a proof for the famous Poincare conjecture—one of the toughest remaining unsolved problems in mathematics, although partial solutions had been made over the decades since it was first proposed in 1904. Apparently he’d stumbled on his insight while working