Suppose they gave a prize, and nobody claimed it? Grigori Perelman wins big.

Not that I'd win it, but, as far as I know, there is no million dollar prize for B2B technology product marketing.

No, the million dollar-ish marketing prizes come if you're lucky and/or smart enough to latch on to a company that goes public and/or gets acquired and is actually worth something. (I've been in on both the go-public and get-acquired end of things, but the yield in the get-acquired case was relatively meager, and in the go-public case. Well, let's just say I never did get to exercise all those make-me-rich options, but I did get to claim a few years worth of capital losses, thanks to the - admittedly modest amount of - pre-IPO shares I felt compelled to purchase.)

But if you're a mathematician, who's doing something a bit more intellectually challenging and (at least theoretically) societally useful than B2B product marketing, you can hit the jackpot.

At least if you're brilliant enough to solve the Poincaré conjecture.

Personally, once I realized the this conjecture hadn't already been solved by Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, I was thinking about taking a stab at it myself - but after I finished up my book of Beware! Very Challenging Sudoku puzzles. It was unlikely, of course, that I would have succeeded. The conjecture involves topology, and, frankly, I don't actually know topology from Topo Gigio - other than that Topo Gigio said "Kees me goodnight, Eddy", and topology doesn't. Nor, for that matter, could I ever get more than one side to work on a Rubik's Cube.

But I didn't have to solve the conjecture, because Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman already did the deed -  and seven years ago, at that. (Why wasn't I informed?)

The million dollar prize was announced late last week by the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts. However,as The New York Times reported this past weekend, Perelman  has made himself pretty scarce over the last few years, so there's some doubt about whether he'll run and take the money.

Perelman had earlier been awarded a Fields Medal (which, in Good Will Hunting, had also been won by Stellan Skarsgård). He was a no-show for that award and, in fact, declined it. (The monetary part of the Fields is pretty paltry - about $15K, by the way.)

Given that he snubbed the Fields, there's some speculation about whether Perelman will surface and take the substantial bait from the Clay Institute.

The Clay Institute is, apparently, not worried:

Will Dr. Perelman accept? “He will let me know in due time,” Dr. [James] Carlson [Institute president] wrote in an e-mail message, acknowledging that they had been in touch. He declined to provide more details.

With or without Perelman, the solution to the Poincaré conjecture will be celebrated this June, in Paris.

Whether Perelman shows up or not, whether he takes the money or decides he neither wants or needs it, whether he really doesn't want to show up and smile for the cameras, in this world of Paris Hiltons, isn't it kind of nice to see genius, intellectual achievement, and, yes, oddball eccentricity, rewarded?