Heading into Bobby Fischer territory?

OK, math isn’t sport, but you’ve got to love the response of Russian Grigory Perelman to a reporter got through to his cell phone to inquire why Perelman was turning down the $1 million he earned by solving a previously untouchable problem.

“You are disturbing me,” Perelman said. “I am picking mushrooms.”

A Michael Wolff post on Newser went on to say that Perelman also snubbed the math community in 2006, refusing to collect the Fields Medal, described as “math’s equivalent of the Oscars.”

The director of a math institute that formerly employed Perelman described him as a loner and said, “He has rather strange moral principles. He feels improper things very strongly. The directly said Perelman might feel his fellow mathematicians aren’t worthy to award him anything.

All this reminds me of a certain eccentric American chess player of a few years ago ...