Formula of personality

I admit, I understand little in the highest mathematics. I was lucky to be born with a humanitarian warehouse of the mind. Although I understand something in the quantities. For example, in mathematics, as in any other science, the main value of the scientist is the main value. But how to measure this personality, how to calculate the coefficient of its genius or calculate the trajectory of its development, even the mathematicians themselves are unlikely to know.

One of the latest examples of the immeasurability of the personality of an outstanding person is the personality of Grigory Perelman, to get closer to the understanding of which the book of Masha Hessen helped us. But this is just an admiration at a distance, because the hero is not very configured to be an object of study. Therefore, the portrait of mathematics, drawn by Hessen, resembles a mosaic puzzle, which the author could not put into a holistic picture for obvious reasons. Readers will not be able to do this. And even Asperger’s syndrome, attributed to the scientist, will not help us to derive the Perelman personality formula, put all his eccentricities on the shelves and give them a clear explanation.

Perhaps Masha Hessen did not strive for this. Not much touching the details of Perelman’s personal life, she focused on his relationship with mathematics. As a result, it turned out to be an almost love affair with the attributes corresponding to him: a passionate to the madness of the scientist for his science, the ingenious fruit of this love, shocked the scientific community, which followed the discord in relations and the inevitable (hopefully that temporary) parting.

The Gessen book is also interesting in that it shows the living movement of scientific knowledge, reveals the logic of the development of science through the fate and generation of researchers, teachers, mentors. No matter how revolutionary or non -traditional, sometimes scientific achievement seems, it always has a long background. As Isaac Newton said: "If I can see further than others, then only because I stand on the shoulders of the giants." And if the solution to the problem of the millennium was not prepared by a dozen other outstanding minds, we would have been waiting for it for a very long time. Grigory Perelman perfectly understands this and therefore, apparently, reacts so peculiarly, or rather, no longer reacts to the hype around his own “brainchild”. Having once stood on the shoulders of giants, he turned into one of them. Now it's time to substitute your shoulders to others.

Igor Pavlov