On 1 July 2010, he rejected the prize of one million dollars, saying that he considered the decision of the board of the Clay Institute to be unfair, in that his contribution to solving the Poincaré conjecture was no greater than that of Richard S. Hamilton, the mathematician who pioneered the Ricci flow partly with the aim of attacking the conjecture.
In August 2006, Perelman was offered the Fields Medal (“Nobel in math”) for “his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow”, but he declined the award, stating: “I’m not interested in money or fame; I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.”
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Grothendieck – besides being a math titan – was an extremely intriguing person. Actually, it is hard to be more “deviated” from regular and especially mediocre human being than he was. While in some sense anarchists, or more generally leftists, I think he was a multi-dimensional, hard to classify personality. For example, after Wikipedia: “devoted himself to political and religious pursuits (first Buddhism and later, a more Catholic Christian vision” or “Influenced by the Catholic mystic Marthe Robin who was claimed to have survived on the Holy Eucharist alone, Grothendieck almost starved himself to death in 1988.” Bruh, WTF 😅 Mathematicians are so interesting people.