Enthusiasm is enjoying the biggest traffic spike in its existence.

The new visitors are coming to see my post about Grigori Perelman, from nearly four years ago. The rush seems to have been prompted by Perelman’s non-collection of the Clay prize for mathematics, which he has been awarded for his solution to the Poincaré Conjecture (now the Poincaré Theorem). Happily, a higher proportion of visitors than usual are taking the time to look around a bit at other things on the site. This is unusual for a traffic spike, and it isn’t the only unusual thing going on.

Aside from the simple fact that Perelman did not collect his prize, there doesn’t seem to be anything new in the story. I know that some of the visitors are coming from a post on a German language message board, but none of the stats reports I monitor for this site can account for the majority of them: hundreds are coming from somewhere I can’t see. (if one or other of you fine people wants to let me know in the comments where you’ve all come from, I’d be glad to hear from you).

Kind of funny that the most attention I’ve had in years is all about a guy whose antipathy towards public attention is basically the reason the world is beating a path to his door; well, that and the fact that he’s passing up a cheque for $1m, which is really getting people’s attention. A few people, notably a Russian children’s charity, appear to be really quite incensed about it, if today’s BBC article is anything to go by – and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.

It looks like refusing money and fame is about the most subversive thing a person can do in this world. Like I said in 2006, he seems like my kind of guy….

Final weird thing (for the moment): the related posts thing at the foot of this post does not consider the original Perelman post, nor either of the two previous follow-up posts, to be related to this one.

Don’t ask me, I only pretend to work here.