Grigori Perelman is a quiet and unassuming mathematician from Russia, who took the world of maths by storm in 2010 when he not only solved the Poincare problem but then refused the $1 million reward! I went along to the Millennium Bridge in London to meet mathematician Katie Steckles to shed some light on Perelman’s story and to find out why the Millennium Bridge was in fact its own millennium maths problem…

• When the Millennium Bridge opened its resonant frequency matched that of walking pedestrians which caused it to vibrate massively as seen in the video below

• In the field of topology things are considered equal if you can get from one to the other by doing a ‘smooth and gradual change’
• The Poincare Conjecture states that any shape satisfying a set of three conditions can be deformed into a sphere, and this will hold true in any number of dimensions
• It had been proved for all dimensions except 4, which was shown to be true by Grigori Perelman in 2002
• He published his proof on the internet and then refused the $1 million prize money, instantly becoming a sensation

You can listen to the full interview for the Naked Scientists here.