Figuring Out Grisha's Incentives

In the last post, I mentioned that Grisha Perleman treated the fact that he was awarded a prize for having solved the Poincare Conjecture with nonchalance.  And I contrasted this to my strong belief that financial prizes especially are a superior way of organizing for intellectual work directed towards the solution of scientific, technical or policy problems. Searching around for any explanations from professional economists to explain Grisha's rejection of both the Fields medal and the Award that comes with a US$ 1 million prize led me to a talk by Steven Levitt. In it he says that financial incentives are demonstrably overrated because people acclimate to them quickly and they fail to provide incentives thereafter. Granted that prof. Levitt was discussing financial incentives as used by businesses, it is still worth noting that designing incentive systems is difficult.

So that leaves the possibility that Grisha Perelman is surfeit with the "psychic income" emanating from solving difficult mathematical problems. Still, the mystery is that Grisha found the prestige that comes with the Fields Medal and the singular distinction of acclamation from the Clay Mathematics Institute to be unimpressive. Perhaps he just want to solve problems in mathematics and be left alone.