Exeter (England), Sept. 6 (Reuters): A reclusive Russian may have solved one of the world’s toughest mathematics problems and stands to win $1 million — but he doesn't appear to care.

Grigori Perelman from St Petersburg claims to have solved the horrendously complicated Poincare Conjecture that tries to explain the behaviour of multi-dimensional shapes in space, thereby making himself eligible for the prize offered by the Massachusetts-based Clay Mathematics Institute.

But there’s a snag. He has simply posted his results on the Internet and left his peers to work out for themselves whether he is right — something they are still struggling to do.

“There is good reason to believe that Perelman's approach is correct. But the trouble is, he won't talk to anybody about it and has shown no interest in the money,” said Keith Devlin, Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University in California.

“There won't be a golden moment when he is suddenly accepted as being right. There will just be a drift in that direction,” he said. The conjecture was proposed by French mathematician Henri Poincare.

Body dating

A new technique using radioactive dating is helping police pin down the approximate time of death of even badly decomposed bodies.

Stuart Black said the British-pioneered technique had already been used to good effect in tracing not only the date of death but also the origin of a headless and limbless torso dubbed Adam, found floating down the Thames river in September 2001.