genius.

Maths genius Grigori Perelman turned down $1 million prize.
Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman solved the seemingly unsolvable Poincaré conjecture, a 100-year-old problem to prove that any shape without a hole can be formed into a sphere.

The problem was one of the seven listed on Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Clay Mathematics Institute’s Millennium Prize list.

The bounty on such a solution? One million dollars and the Fields Medal, math’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Considered one of the world’s smartest men, Perelman published two proofs of the theorem in 2002 and 2003. It took until last year for a team of mathematicians to validate his results.

While his work was celebrated, he rejected any accolades. The reclusive genius is only now talking about why he turned down the money.

When it comes to awards and monetary gain, Perelman just isn’t interested; the genius refused the prize, claiming the knowledge gained to be worth more than the financial reward.

“I’m not interested in money or fame,” Perelman stated.

“Emptiness is everywhere and it can be calculated, which gives us a great opportunity. I know how to control the universe. So tell me, why should I run for a million?” he told the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

words of wisdom.

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
— Edward Abbey

remember.

“When he tells you that you are nothing don’t believe him and if he can’t learn to love you you should leave him. You know it makes me unhappy when brothas make babies, and leave a young mother to be a pappy. Since we all came from a woman, got our name from a woman, and our game from a woman, I wonder why we take from our women. Why do we rape our women, why do we hate our women? I think it’s time to kill for our women, time to heal our women, be real to our women and if we don’t we’ll have a race of babies that will hate the ladies that make the babies. Since a man can’t make one, he has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one."
— TuPac Shakur

i figured out why im obsessed with smelling old books!

Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.