A MATHS genius who won fame last week for apparently spurning a million-dollar prize is living with his mother in a humble flat in St Petersburg, co-existing on her $74-a-month pension, because he has been unemployed since December.

Grigory "Grisha" Perelman stunned the maths world when he revealed in 2002 his solution to a century-old puzzle known as the Poincare Conjecture.

But friends say he cannot afford to travel to the International Mathematics Union's convention in Madrid, where his peers want him to receive the maths equivalent of the Nobel Prize tomorrow, but is too modest to ask anyone to underwrite his trip.