Alexander Zabrovskiy: Perelman proved to be absolutely sane, healthy, adequate and normal person. He is realistic, pragmatic and sensible, yet he is not without sentimentality and eagerness … All that press gossips, as if he is «insane», are utter rubbish! He knows his own mind and also knows how to reach the goal. We talked to him for two hours – he is an unusually interesting interlocutor.
We're shooting a movie with Perelman. In our film, we want to talk about cooperation and confrontation between three major world mathematical schools In our film, we want to talk about cooperation and confrontation between the three major world mathematical schools whose efforts help to study and manipulate the universe: Russian, Chinese and American. Perelman and American scientist Hamilton made the main thing – they found a way to comprehend the shape of our universe. The film is about the knowledge of the universe and people who learn it. It is also about the ethical "standards" in science and scientists forced conformism ... Fragments of an interview c G.Y.Perelman: «I’m able to calculate interstices»
- Grigori Yakovlevich, you presented the USSR in the mathematical competition in Budapest as far back as you were schoolboy. Then you took the gold medal …
- While we were preparing to the competition, we tried to solve the problem, where the ability to think abstractly was an indispensable condition. That abstraction from mathematical logic was the whole point of our daily training. It is necessary to imagine the «small piece of the world» to find the proper solution.
- Isn’t it difficult to schoolboys?
- If we talk about the conditioned and unconditioned reflexes, the infant learns the world from birth. If you can train arms and legs, why can’t you train the brain? Thanks to our teachers, we are already well studied topology - science that allows us to understand properties of the space and manipulate formulas. Due to that we realize the practical value of formulas, which helps to achieve quick and precise results. By the way, I did not consider that victory as some marquee event - it was just one of many steps in the knowledge of favorite science.
- In the twenty-odd years you broke new ground…
- I didn’t break new ground … I just continued to explore problems of studying properties of three-dimensional space of the universe. It’s too exciting.