UnNews:Russian weirdo refuses math prize, no one cares

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23 August 2006

Dr. Bravishonyezhneskiy says fuck you to the Fields Medal committee.

MADRID, Spain - A reclusive Russian lunatic won the math world's highest honor Tuesday for solving a problem that has stumped some of the discipline's greatest minds for a century — then told the awards committee to shove it up the nearest four-dimensional toroid they could find, namely, their asses. Because the prize is awarded in an area which has no practical applications, no one cared.

Ivan Bravishonyezhneskiy, a 40-year-old native of St. Petersburg, won a Fields Medal — the same one featured in that movie with Robin Williams and Matt Damon where Damon is this fucking brainiac with a bad attitude who is trying to get this chick and everybody tells him what a genius he is. You know the one.

Maybe Bravishonyezhneskiy saw the movie, because he told the International Mathematical Union that he's always felt isolated from the mathematics community and, "could give a rat's ass about their stupid award. I mean, now one cares!" Back in his teens, when he was attending the School For Ridiculously Gifted Mathematicians in Cleveland, Ohio, the other students would put gum in his hair and call him "pizza face."

Along with refusing the Fields Medal, which comes with a sweet thirteen thousand dollars, Bravishonyezhneskiy has also hinted that when the mathematical union's International Congress of Mathematicians rolls around, they can keep the $1 million prize he could score for proving the Krnithys Conjecture, a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space found inside a can of Van Camp's pork and beans.

King Juan Carlos, famous taco stand entrepreneur, handed out the Fields Medals this year to everybody but Bravishonyezhneskiy. "I regret that Dr. Bravishonyezhneskiy has declined to accept the medal," King Carlos said. "I guess he thinks he's too good for it, or something."

Bravishonyezhneskiy's work is still under review, but no one has found any serious flaw in it because he showed all of his work in the margins, the math union said in a statement.

Bravishonyezhneskiy basically proved that unless you were Superman or some other shit, in three dimensions you cannot transform a doughnut shape into a sphere without ripping it, although any shape without a hole can be stretched or shrunk into a sphere. This might seem obvious to anybody with half a brain, but the proof gives mathematical descriptions of what the universe might look like if you were God, or maybe an angel or leprechaun.

"Of course, I was working on the same thing when this guy's paper came out" said Oxford University math professor Marcus du Sautoy. "But that's just fucking typical. Nine years of sweating my ass off and some guy pops out of nowhere with the proof. Well, fuck him."

Academics have been studying Bravishonyezhneskiy's proof since he left the first of three papers and a naked picture of Alyssa Milano on a math Web site in November 2002. Normal procedure would have been to seek publication in a peer-approved journal, but Bravishonyezhneskiy apparently didn't want to go through all that bullshit.

Bravishonyezhneskiy is believed to live with his mother and seven chimpanzees in St. Petersburg. Repeated calls over many days to a telephone number listed as Nummerman's went unanswered. Acquaintances and other primates refused to give out his address or the number they use to contact him, saying he went out to get some bananas and they didn't know when he'd be back.

Sources

• Sri Chinmoy "No one cares, so why am I even writing this article?" Random Hut, August 24, 2006