Ask A Genius 1556: Rick Rosner vs. Grigori Perelman: Charm, Genius, and Barroom Odds
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/28
Who leaves the bar first: Rick Rosner or Grigori Perelman?
Rick Rosner opens with a cheeky challenge: in a bar of sixty-year-old women, he claims he would leave with a date faster than Grigori Perelman. Scott Douglas Jacobsen grounds the banter with facts—Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture, declined the Fields Medal and Clay prize, and lives reclusively. The duo calibrate odds, debating five-eighths versus nine-sixteenths while teasing variables—American versus Russian patrons, shared Jewish background, flirtation strategies, and Rosner’s past as a stripper. The exchange is a playful thought experiment about charm, fame, and probability, not a moral treatise, balancing irreverent humor with precise references to mathematics, awards, and cultural nuance.
Rick Rosner: So let’s get started. Or should we begin with my claim that if you put Grigori Perelman and me in a bar full of 60-year-old ladies, seven times out of eight, I will go home with one of them quicker than Grigori Perelman—even though he solved… what did he solve? Not Fermat’s—what was it?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The Poincaré conjecture.
Rosner: Poincaré, fine. You can do that till the cows come home. I’m going home with a divorced lady.
Jacobsen: Hold on. Who are the women in the bar? What’s the demographic? Americans or Russians?
Rosner: Is he Russian or American?
Jacobsen: He is Russian. You’re both Jewish.
Rosner: All right, I guess we have to make it half and half. And I suppose he could go home with a Russian lady as long as he’s got cigarettes and lunch meat.
Jacobsen: May I give an estimate and then get your response?
Rosner: Go ahead.
Jacobsen: Ten times out of sixteen.
Rosner: Wait—ten times out of sixteen I go home with someone before he does?
Jacobsen: Okay, fine. Twenty out of thirty-two.
Rosner: That’s the same fraction.
Jacobsen: I know.
Rosner: Is he married? What’s his deal?
Jacobsen: I don’t think so. No, he declined the Fields Medal in 2006 and the $1 million Clay Millennium Prize in 2010 after proving the Poincaré conjecture. He left academic life and is known as a reclusive, accomplished mathematician.
Rosner: All right, I’ll give you that five-eighths ratio—62.5 percent—if the crowd in the bar is half Russian women and half the older versions of people whose IDs I used to check back in the ’80s. Now they’re fully of age. They’ve been divorced. Some might be plump church ladies; others might be cougars.
When I was a stripper, I wish I’d known this. I’ve told you about the secret to making your dick look longer when you’re stripping: you grab it and stretch it. That’ll give you a minute, maybe seventy-five seconds, of extra length. So my strategy would be—if nothing else worked—I could charm a group of women into pretending they’d hired me for a bachelorette party. Then I’d take my clothes off and gyrate around. I don’t think Grigori Perelman would do that.
Jacobsen: I think that might make it nine-sixteenths.
Rosner: So you’re talking about 0.5625.
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