In 2002 and 2003 the former child prodigy had quietly published the solution to the Poincaré conjecture, that had baffled scientists for nearly a century. Highly complex, the riddle involved proving a hypothesis about three dimensional space, a puzzle that academics believe helps further understanding about the way the universe is structured. It took four years for teams of academics around the world to check Mr Perelman's solution, but eventually they confirmed that he had cracked a conundrum that many had thought unsolvable.