So what kind of young person would become a NASA Scholar? For example, a young person like Grigori Perelman in his youth would:
http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Mi-So/Perelman-Grigory.htmlFrom Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_PerelmanGrigori Perelman was born in Leningrad, USSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russia) on 13 June 1966, to a Jewish family. His mother gave up graduate work in mathematics in order to raise him. His mathematical talent became apparent at the age of ten, and his mother enrolled him in Sergei Rushkin's after-school math training program.[6]
His mathematical education continued at the Leningrad Secondary School #239, a specialized school with advanced mathematics and physics programs. In 1982, as a member of the USSR team competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad, an international competition for high school students, he won a gold medal, achieving a perfect score.[7] In the late 1980s, Perelman went on to earn a Candidate of Science degree (the Soviet equivalent to the Ph.D.) at the Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty of the Leningrad State University, one of the leading universities in the former Soviet Union. His dissertation was titled "Saddle surfaces in Euclidean spaces".
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Why all the fuss about Perelman's genius? Consider:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_conjecture
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/01/AR2010070106247.htmlRussian mathematician wins $1 million prize, but he appears to be happy with $0
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2010
Who would turn down a $1 million prize for solving a math problem?
Perhaps the smartest man in the world.
Three months ago, a famously impoverished Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman was awarded the prestigious $1 million Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize for his groundbreaking work -- having solved a problem of three-dimensional geometry that had resisted scores of brilliant mathematicians since 1904.
Thursday, the institute announced that Perelman, known equally for his brilliance and his eccentricities, formally and finally turned down the award and the money. He didn't deserve it, he told a Russian news service, because he was following a mathematical path set by another.
The president of the Clay Institute, James Carlson, said that Perelman was a mathematician of "extraordinary power and creativity" and that it was he alone who solved the intractable Poincar�'s conjecture. "All mathematicians follow the work of others, but only a handful make breakthroughs of this magnitude," Carlson said.
Still, while he had been hopeful that Perelman would take the prize, he was hardly surprised that he did not. Perelman had already turned down several of the world's top awards in mathematics. And when he solved the Poincar� conjecture, he ignored the peer-review process and simply posted his three-part solution online. That was in 2003.
It took other mathematicians two years to determine that he had indeed solved the problem.
"The community knew about Perelman, and that's why they took him seriously," Carlson said. "But what he did is definitely not the way things are normally done."
Immediately after his postings, Perelman was invited to lecture at several top American universities, and did so with aplomb. Speaking in fluent English, he wowed his math colleagues and, after returning to Russia, continued to communicate via e-mail with some about his work. Within several years, however, he stopped responding and left the math world, Carlson said.
"I went to St. Petersburg almost two years ago and I did get him on the phone," Carlson said. "I told him I'd like to meet, but he said it 'wasn't necessary at this time.' "
Perelman lives in a bare-bones apartment in St. Petersburg with his elderly mother; a poor and reclusive man with long, wild hair and, in his photos, a look of fierce pride. Carlson said that when he spoke with Perelman, the man had quit his research and teaching job at Russia's top institute and did not appear to have other employment.
The Poincar� conjecture, named after prominent French mathematician Henri Poincar�, involves a complex problem in the field of topology -- an important area of math that studies the enduring properties of objects that are stretched or otherwise deformed, but not torn or otherwise reconstituted. Scores of prominent mathematicians tried to solve it over decades but failed, leading to its characterization as the Mount Everest of math.
The $1 million prize was to be the first of seven Millennium awards given out by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Clay Institute to mathematicians who master long-unsolved problems. The program was established in 2000 and an award will only be made if one of the seven selected math problems is resolved.
Perelman, 43, did not show up for the early June ceremony in Paris where his prize was to be awarded. Author Masha Gessen, who wrote a book about Perelman, told the prize committee earlier this year that Perelman would not attend the Paris event, but said he had not decided whether to accept the prize money.
The Poincar� conjecture was updated over the years and one of its modifiers, William Thurston, said at the ceremony in Paris that "Perelman's aversion to public spectacle and to riches is mystifying to many. I have not talked to him about it and I can certainly not speak for him, but I want to say I have complete empathy and admiration for his inner strength and clarity, to be able to know and hold true to himself. . . . We have learned from Perelman's mathematics. Perhaps we should also pause to reflect on ourselves and learn from Perelman's attitude toward life."
In 2006, Perelman turned down another coveted award in mathematics, the Fields Medal, which honored "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure" of topology. The journal Science credited Perelman with the scientific breakthrough of 2006, the first time a mathematician had been recognized.
Still, Perelman was quoted by the Interfax news service this week as saying he believes his contribution in proving the Poincar� conjecture was no greater than that of American mathematician Richard Hamilton, who first suggested a pathway toward the solution.
The Clay Institute was founded in 1998 by Boston businessman Landon T. Clay and his wife, Lavinia. Its mission statement says the institute was formed "to increase and disseminate mathematical knowledge." On its Web site, the institute says its leaders will make an announcement this fall about how the prize money will be used to benefit mathematics.
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As I stated in my Reply #79040 on this thread: "Get real, and show some compassion to those who deserve it through no fault of their own. What is real is this: I was born without a left hand, which is a birth defect. What is real is this: A genius child is born that way, which is a birth defect. The term "gifted" masks an awful truth, which is that gifted children often suffer through the same unending calamity as that suffered by birth defected children, because genius is a birth defect that sets its victim apart from almost everyone else. I have witnessed ragged grief and painful tears expressed by my own daughters over this, and I have known those emotions firsthand and intimately at the very deepest levels of my own being at many times throughout my life because of my lack of a hand. There is nothing cute about it when a child bitterly laments and offers to God the entirety of her intelligence in exchange for just one honest friendship."
Furthermore, as I stated in my NAPS proposal:
http://nasa-academy-of-the-physical...11/first-model-university-of-oregon.html"NAPS will put an enormous academic and emotional strain on its NASA Scholars, especially during the junior year. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that each and every scholar can relate in a genuine supportive way with his/her classmate scholars especially, but also with scholars from the other two grade levels and with the �high school� teachers. Because emotional maturity is not always on a par with intellectual maturity, gifted adolescents in the transition to adulthood need friends who can understand them. Gifted adolescents are adolescents at risk who are sometimes very vulnerable to social challenges, and they tend to know this about themselves. But, in usual settings, they are alone with their fears. NAPS academies will have the opportunity to create a safe haven in which truly extraordinary young people can experience what it feels like to be ordinary, at least during the while when they are among peer classmates; the importance of this cannot be overstated: a NAPS site will either succeed or fail in its primary purpose by whether or not it can succeed in making its scholars feel ordinary."
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Finally, as I stated in my letter to The Pauling Blog:
http://paulingblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/pauling-and-the-nobel-prize-trip/"Though I am proud of my academy idea in its entirety, I am especially proud of the Colloquy honoring Linus Pauling. I believe the Colloquy will be the most inspiring and life-changing learning experience of all for some academy scholars, and I look at it as something Linus Pauling would be proud to have his name on. Being awarded The Linus Pauling Medal at a �NASA Academy of the Physical Sciences� will be a high distinction that will certainly earn some academy scholars significant university scholarships.
If you have not read through the Colloquy description in my document, please do so. And then remember back to being in high school. The academically-minded high-achieving grade-driven student who will be the typical academy scholar will be entirely flummoxed by the Colloquy in the beginning, because all of the usual motivations are gone: it is Pass / No Pass with no need whatsoever to please or impress the teacher, but with every need to impress and influence peers with clear thinking, precise articulation, and persuasive argument in achieving a growing agreement toward a common goal of identifying and advancing an idea for the good of humanity.
A careful read of the Colloquy description reveals the telling endgame decision that will seriously challenge some academy scholars: Do you abandon the growing consensus of the group effort when the rules allow you to revert to being a lone wolf again, or do you stick with the group effort (even if only in a supportive role) to make the shared solution the best that it can be?
In the world of ideas, there are those who create, invent, or form ideas, and there are those who make ideas happen � the doers. The idea people need the doers more than the doers need the idea people; the doers can muddle on because they will always accomplish something in the process, but the idea people and their ideas will die lonely deaths if they cannot persuade the doers to actually make things happen. The Colloquy will identify both the idea people and the doers, and sometimes the doers will be those who are most deserving of praise and recognition � and should be those who sometimes receive The Linus Pauling Medal for their efforts.
Again, I think Linus Pauling would be proud."
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I hereby award Grigori Perelman the first Linus Pauling Medal ever awarded � not as an actuality, but as an abstract thought that recognizes who he is in relation to the world he must live in. Perelman is not crazy. Rather, he is who he is � a deeply principled man.
Grigori Perelman would have benefited from feeling "ordinary" for three years while he was a teenager. That "ordinary" feeling felt during a fleeting but memorable time in his life would have been a blessing that might have endured throughout his adulthood, and might have given his principled thoughts enough of a balance that he would now be willing to accept the prizes that he well deserves. It is sad. But he is not failing himself now in his actions; it is we who have failed him � and the others like him who struggle because they live in a lonely parallel universe that very few people understand and can even imagine.
The Crime Against Humanity is this: In America in 2010, young people like Grigori Perelman in his youth are now attending local public high schools, and are enduring the normal curriculum at those schools because there is nothing else for them. But the greater horror is this: we as the voting adults in our society are responsible, and have continuing complicity in that crime until something like NAPS becomes a reality.
How long will we wait until we finally do what needs to be done?
Steven A. Sylwester
