On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of mathematics’ seven most important unsolvable problems had been cracked…and by a reclusive Rasputin-looking Russian mathematician who may not even want the million-dollar prize! Personally, I think the bearded, crotchety “Grisha Perelman” is a hoax invented by a cabal of mathematicians trying to make math look interesting, by flogging the tired old mad-scientist stereotype a little more. They’re sick of all the young people thinking mathematicians are going to be cute, sensitive Will Hunting types. All the shrieking girls when you get out of the limo at math conferences…that has to wear on you after a while.

I don’t pretend to know much about the Poincaré Conjecture–or indeed, about any higher math–but I did get some of the flavor of long-unsolved math conjectures when I read John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession, about the Riemann Hypothesis, earlier this year. The Times makes Perelman’s proof sound like an elegant and unexpected one, so maybe it’s not a brute-force computer proof of the kind that cracked the four-color map theorem in 1976.

On the other hand, the Times points out that Fields Medals have twice been awarded for recent progress toward a Poincaré solution (in 1960 for a proof in five dimensions and in 1983 for a proof in four) so maybe this was thought to be one of the more “potentially solvable” of the Millennium Prize problems. It’s not as if p-versus-np was suddenly proved last night. Hey, do any math types out there have any sense of the expected “order of difficulty” of the seven (or six!) Millennium Prize problems? I think there should be Vegas odds. “I just put $200 on Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer over Navier-Stokes at Harrah’s.” “Oh yeah? What was the spread?”