The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  If the gold needles had stayed up there against that cerulean October sky forever, surely we would have eventually gotten used to them, and taken them for granted.

  Hiking down off a mountain from far in the backcountry, I stop at dusk, weary, and without shedding my burdened pack take a seat on an old fallen larch, one of those ancient giants from the last century, its heartwood finally rotting but its outer husk still firm.

  The immense log is covered completely with the gold confetti of its descendants growing all around it, and there is no table or other furniture I have ever seen more elegant or beautiful than that impromptu bench, nor more timely—I was tired and needed a place to rest, so I sat down and it was there for me—and I sit there resting for a long time, watching the dusk give itself over to dark.

  And just as there is no furniture that could be the equal of a fallen larch left in the woods to rot or burn at its own pace, or under the pace of this landscape that is so intensely its partner, surely there can be no gold-lined streets of heaven superior to what awaits the residents of this valley on a fine October morning after a night during which the wind has blown hard, when our dreams of a night sky filled with swirling, shimmering gold are exceeded only by the beauty of reality as we first step outside to see one more glorious season being born into the ceaseless and enduring world.

  BRETT FORREST

  Shattered Genius

  FROM Playboy

  I HAD NEVER BEEN on a stakeout, but I knew how it was done. I took a book. I brought a few sandwiches. I flipped on the radio and listened to the traffic report in Russian. That kept me awake as I waited for the mathematician.

  I’d first heard of Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman about nine years ago, as news of his achievement leaked beyond the international mathematics community into popular headlines. Word was that someone had solved an unsolvable math problem. The Poincaré Conjecture concerns three-dimensional spheres, and it has broad implications for spatial relations and quantum physics, even helping to explain the shape of the universe. For nearly one hundred years the conjecture had confused the sharpest minds in math, many of whom claimed to have proven it, only to have their work discarded upon scrutiny. The problem had broken spirits, wasted lives. By the time Perelman defeated the conjecture, after many years of concentrated exertion, the Poincaré had affected him so profoundly that he appeared broken too.

  Perelman, now forty-six, had a certain flair. When he completed his proof, over a number of months in 2002 and 2003, he did not publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal, as protocol would suggest. Nor did he vet his conclusions with the mathematicians he knew in Russia, Europe, and the United States. He simply posted his solution online in three parts—the first was named “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applications”—and then e-mailed an abstract to several former associates, many of whom he had not contacted in nearly a decade.

  I liked his style. The more he did, the more I liked. In 2006 Perelman became the first person to turn down the Fields Medal, the top award in mathematics (there is no Nobel Prize in math). He has declined professorships at Princeton, Berkeley, and Columbia. In 2010, when the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, awarded him a $1 million prize for proving the Poincaré Conjecture, Perelman refused it. Unemployed these past seven years, he lives with his mother in a former communal apartment in St. Petersburg, the two subsisting on her monthly pension of $160. “I have all that I need,” Perelman has told his concerned Russian math colleagues, with whom he has severed all but the most perfunctory telephone relations.

  Perelman last gave an interview six years ago, shortly after a collective of PhDs finished a three-year confirmation of his proof. Since then, the domestic and international press have harassed him into reclusion. Perelman has spurned all media requests, muttering tersely through his apartment door against a wave of journalists. “I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo,” he told one reporter. “My activity and my persona have no interest for society.” When one journalist reached him by phone, Perelman told him, “You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms.”

  While Russian society has largely passed judgment on Perelman—misanthrope, wacko—I admired him for his renunciation of the modern world’s expectations, his devotion to labor, his results. He had not solicited fame or reward in proving the Poincaré, so why should he be required to react to public notice? His will was free, his results pure, and therein lay his glory.

  There was more than one path to glory, I reasoned, and some glory might be found were I to solve this riddle. Perelman was the riddle, speaking through mathematics, the complex language of his Poincaré proof incomprehensible to all but a few hundred mathematicians. For the rest of us, eager to grasp the meaning of exceptional behavior, there was only silence. With slight hope, I booked my ticket to St. Petersburg.

  In advance of my trip I phoned Sergei Kislyakov, the director of St. Petersburg’s Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where Perelman had worked as a researcher. In late 2005, two years after his Poincaré proof had made him the biggest name in his field, Perelman handed Kislyakov his resignation, stating that he had been “disappointed” in math. He was abandoning math altogether, he said.

  Kislyakov knew how obstinate Perelman could be. When I explained that I planned to speak with Perelman, Kislyakov interrupted me. “I discourage you from coming here,” he said. “Perelman talks to no one, but he particularly hates journalists.”

  “My editor has told me to go,” I explained.

  Kislyakov sighed. “Then I guess you must.”

  It was spring. St. Petersburg was preparing for the Victory Day parade. Tanks lined the central canals. Banners crested the streets. In Kupchino, the southernmost stop on the blue Metro line, far from the palaces that give Petersburgers their proud self-possession, it looked like any other new day. The red-and-white trolleys coursed up the grassy center lanes of the avenues. People strolled in the courtyards that connected the battered housing projects. Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev had grown up in Kupchino, but this neighborhood was so removed from fame and influence that it made a perfect home for someone who preferred to escape all notice.

  In my search for Perelman, I thought I might rent an apartment, find one with a good view of his building’s entrance. A real estate agent walked me all over the neighborhood. “Isn’t there a well-known scientist around here?” I ventured casually.

  “He lives somewhere on this street,” said the broker.

  “Have you ever seen him?”

  “Seen him?” he said with a laugh. “Sure, I’ve seen him. Like I’ve seen Putin—on TV.” The guy showed me one dump after another.

  To get around, I rented a Hyundai, all that was available at the leasing agency downtown. I parked outside Perelman’s building. A dozen stories high, made of unadorned concrete panels in the dull Brezhnev style, the structure covered half the block. A handful of people gathered in front of the brown steel door to Perelman’s stairwell, smoking, passing around a morning beer. In this place it appeared there was little rush to achievement.

  On a previous day I had met one of Perelman’s neighbors, a teacher at a local school. She said that she and others in their building joked about pleading with Perelman to accept the $1 million prize on their behalf. I couldn’t tell which was the source of greater amusement to her, the idea that Perelman would accept the million or the idea that he would engage her in conversation. Perelman mixed with no one, she said, refusing even to ride the elevator unless he was the only one in it.

  And with whom would he mix? The people I saw were roughly drawn, the elderly leaning on spindly wooden canes, the teenagers darting between the kiosks, wasting the day. An androgynous bum with dirty blond hair nosed around the garbage. An old lady in a coarse gown looked at me through the windshield, then spat.

  Ragged as these surroundings were, Perelman exceeded them. As a younger man, he had been handsome, with soft, dark features. But recent pic
tures—taken with a cell-phone camera in a subway car and then transmitted across the web—projected a different image. Perelman’s clothes were dirty and rumpled, his black beard mangy. Ringing the bald crown of his head was a nest of hair that stood on end. He looked disturbed as he gazed out from under thick eyebrows, chewing a nail. How would he react when I approached him?

  My mark did not appear that first day, and I cautioned myself to have the patience of Perelman. He had spent seven years proving the Poincaré Conjecture, seven years displaying the sort of patience that is well beyond most people. The editors of one Russian tabloid ran out of patience tracking him. When they sent a reporter to Kupchino, the reporter got nothing. A female clerk said she had once exchanged a few words with Perelman. The next morning the headline read, THE SECRET LOVE OF GRIGORI PERELMAN.

  When I met Sergei Rukshin, Perelman’s closest friend, I realized that my respected counterparts in the Russian press had complicated my task. “Nice to meet you,” I said when I arrived at Rukshin’s office in a St. Petersburg high school. He replied, “We’ll see if it will be nice or not.” But like a rusty faucet, once turned, Rukshin gushed, speaking about Perelman for more than four hours.

  It was Rukshin, serving as the instructor of a specialized Leningrad math club, who recognized Perelman’s talent in 1976. It was Rukshin, along with other supporters in academe, who piloted Perelman through the anti-Semitic Soviet policies that nearly prevented the young Jewish genius from obtaining an education commensurate with his mind. And it is Rukshin who now grieves over the condition of this favored pupil: “He lives in a blockade.”

  Day two of my stakeout. A truck pulled up and parked, obstructing my view of the entrance to Perelman’s wing of the building. As I opened the door of my car, a few guys with fresh cuts on their faces straggled by carrying a ten A.M. bottle, looking for something to do. I stayed where I was, grazing on chips, and kept my eyes on either side of the truck, where I could still see people passing by. A man in an ink-black coat appeared in front of my car. He waved his hands at me wildly, yelling, “No, no.” Then he turned away. I couldn’t figure out what that meant, except to say that the locals were beginning to notice me. The potential for violence mounted hourly.

  There wasn’t much I could do about that, and I thought instead about Perelman’s evolution. Rukshin told me that as a child Perelman had interacted with other students, that he had not been antisocial. Besides math, he enjoyed Ping-Pong and the opera. According to Rukshin and others who have known him since adolescence, Perelman is heterosexual, but as Rukshin noted, “If Grisha ever looked on anything with loving eyes, it was on the blackboard.” No friend can recall the name of a girlfriend. Shortly after Perelman earned his PhD, the Soviet Union collapsed. He left for the United States, where he performed postdoctoral research at NYU, Berkeley, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was out in the world, interacting with contemporaries. He was doing things.

  Yet he was already turning inward. When the top mathematicians in Russia were earning roughly $100 a month in salary, Perelman was exposed to a Western world of tenured professors, academic grants, and funded research labs—the business side of academe. “It’s possible to sell a theorem and it’s possible to buy it,” he told Rukshin when he returned to Russia, disenchanted, in 1995. “Even if you don’t have anything to do with it.”

  Perelman had already begun his work on the Poincaré Conjecture, a theorem expounded in 1904 by Henri Poincaré, a French polymath and the founder of topology, the mathematical study of abstract shape. Because the problem had a history of false proofs, Perelman told no one about his work lest he be discouraged. He was also wary that unsolicited input would cloud his mind. “For Grisha, it was complete self-restriction,” Nikolai Mnev, a friend and former colleague of Perelman’s, told me.

  Had I such industry, my life might have carried me to a position loftier than the seat of a Hyundai on St. Petersburg’s provincial fringe, waiting for someone who would be displeased to see me, should he appear at all. The hours passed. I bit into a sandwich, bundled my Windbreaker and used it as a pillow.

  Who was I to complain? Perelman had truly suffered, acutely. He withstood a claim—since refuted—on his Poincaré proof from a rival Chinese mathematician. He turned down the Fields Medal, believing that acceptance would be, as Rukshin explained, fundamentally dishonest. Perelman once rebuffed a TV crew from Russia’s Channel One when they barged through his apartment door, pushing aside his mother. He withstood the procrastination of the Clay Mathematics Institute, which took its sweet time—five years—to offer him the $1 million it had committed to the person who solved the Poincaré. “Grisha is tortured by the imperfection of humanity,” Rukshin said.

  All this was going through my mind when, suddenly, Perelman appeared. Over a field of parked cars, his wild hair bounced along as he walked away from me on the path by his door. I had to chase after him. I opened the car door. When I looked up from the handle, relocating my mark, I saw that it was not Perelman. It was simply a man with wild hair, fleeing the pleas of the androgynous bum.

  It was day three of the stakeout, and still no sign of Perelman. I was secretly relieved, since I had no idea what to ask him. I’m not much of an interviewer. I approach my subjects as if we were in a bar, chatting over a beer. A standard swindle but enjoyable, if I’m not mistaken. People like talking about themselves. You just have to give them the chance.

  But how do you talk to somebody who doesn’t talk to anybody? Every question I thought to ask, I knew Perelman wouldn’t answer. I couldn’t take direction from the Russian press, which had deluged him with questions about why he wouldn’t accept the money, why he had turned down the Fields Medal, why he wouldn’t talk to them.

  I didn’t want to bother Perelman. I didn’t want to be like all the others who had forced him into exile. I believed there was a delicate way to approach him.

  I consulted those who knew him. When I met with Alexander Abramov in Moscow, he described the last phone call he had had with Perelman, three years prior. Abramov, a professor, has known Perelman since 1982, when he coached the Soviet team at the International Math Olympiad. (Perelman won a gold medal, posting a perfect score.) Exasperated by Perelman’s solitude, Abramov asked him what he should do in order to meet with him. Perelman suggested that Abramov move to St. Petersburg. “Forever?” Abramov asked. “Maybe,” said Perelman before hanging up the phone.

  Maybe Perelman didn’t like Abramov anymore. Maybe he didn’t like anybody anymore. “I’m afraid he is at the level of a nervous breakdown,” Rukshin said. “If this was still the Soviet Union, he would be forced into psychiatric treatment for this behavior.” In 2008 Perelman asked Rukshin to limit their phone calls. Now they speak about once a year.

  “It looks very much like the story of Bobby Fischer,” Abramov said. “And Bobby Fischer couldn’t be called a happy man.”

  It was the afternoon of day three, and the androgynous bum pleaded through my car window for a few rubles. Even up close I could not tell if this was a man or a woman. I watched the bum move along a little richer. When I refocused my eyes on Perelman’s door, I heard myself gasp, “There he is!”

  It was Perelman all right. The beard, the hair, the expression of uncertainty as he stumbled into the sun with his mother, Lyubov, by his side. He shuffled toward the garbage bins stacked by the door, looking as if he might rummage through them. He wore a black ski jacket, a black shirt, black pants. His mother was dressed in a red overcoat and a white beret. They turned down the lane, heading toward the courtyard behind their building. I locked the car.

  The courtyard was the size of a city block, with trees, parking lots, and playgrounds. Trailing at a considerable distance, I saw Perelman and his mother moving across a grassy field. I decided to approach him head-on rather than sneak up from behind, taking all measures to avoid agitating him. Even though I knew he had known English quite well at one time in his life, I thought it best to speak Russian with him
to put him at ease.

  I walked along one edge of the courtyard, hoping to meet him as he reached its far side. I hurried past a trash heap, around the fencing of a dead tennis court. I circled around a small school, and when I reached the far edge of the grassy field, Perelman and his mother weren’t there. I had lost them.

  Frantically I searched the courtyard. I located them again, along a row of parked cars. But when I made another loop in order to get in front of them, I didn’t see them. When I spotted Perelman and his mother once more, they were heading back the way they had come. I didn’t have the luxury of positioning. I would have to approach them from behind. I walked briskly. I was 20 yards from Perelman and closing. Still I didn’t know what to say.

  Then I was at his side, and there was no more time to think. “Grigori Yakovlevich?” I said, employing his middle name, in polite Russian form. “Is it you?”

  Perelman’s head rotated slowly. He appraised me from the corner of one eye. He said nothing. “Excuse me, please,” I continued. “I don’t want to bother you. But I have come from America to speak with you.”

  Up close, Perelman looked about five-foot-ten and slighter than I had imagined. He was less menacing than he appeared in pictures. He did not waste thought on his appearance, though. Dandruff caked the shoulders of his coat. His clothes were streaked with stains.

  Perelman spoke with a high-toned, birdlike voice. And he knew what to say. “You’re a journalist?” he asked. His mother peeked at me from behind his shoulder, then pulled away. I nodded. Perelman looked at the sky, letting out a pained sigh. We took several small steps together. “From which publication?” he asked.