For the Love of Truth

Inspiring stories about two great thinkers who didn't seek fame and fortune for their work.

I’d long known that Isaac Newton was never one to seek fame and fortune, but I was still surprised by a story I recently heard about his solution to a formidable mathematical problem. In 1696, Johann Bernoulli challenged the mathematicians of Europe to find the path down which a heavily weighted object would fall from one point to another in the shortest amount of time. At the time, Newton was preoccupied with his duties at the Royal Mint. When he received the challenge, he solved it overnight and submitted the solution anonymously.

Bernoulli nevertheless concluded that the quality of the work itself bore Newton’s signature. He is said to have exclaimed, “Tanquam ex ungue leonem”—”I recognize the lion by his claw.”

Even more conspicuous than Newton’s anonymous submission was Grigori Perelman’s rejection of a major prize and $1 million of prize money for solving the Poincaré conjecture.

Proposed by Henri Poincaré in 1904, this is one of the most famous problems in topology. Simply stated, the conjecture is as follows:

Any closed, three-dimensional space with no holes—meaning every closed loop can be continuously shrunk to a point—is topologically the same as a standard three-dimensional sphere.

Such was Poincaré’s intuition, but he was unable to prove it mathematically, and for almost a century, many distinguished mathematicians submitted proofs, but all were found to contain errors.

In 2002-2003, the 36-year-old Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman was living in a modest apartment in St. Petersburg with his mother when he solved (in papers he published online) the solution to the Poincaré conjecture.

For his work, he was offered the prestigious Fields Medal in 2006 and the Millennium Prize of 1 million dollars in 2010. He rejected both, claiming that his solution was reward enough for him and that he didn’t want fame, attention, or even money.

Veritatem invenire satis praemii est. To discover the truth is reward enough.