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Comment by UhUhUhUh | Hacker News Reader

Good news are hard to come by. When seminal papers will get there first, things will be well on their way!

One example of this happening: Perlman's proof of the Poincare conjecture was posted on the arXiv first (http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0211159). In fact, I don't think it was ever formally published.

Yes, and for those who may not know, Perelman is to date the only mathematician to have rejected the Fields Medal. (Aside: I was at the Madrid congress when this was announced in 2006. Pretty shocking, if not completely unexpected.) So, I think we are dealing with a pretty clear outlier here.

I can understand refusing the money on principle, but it's always nice to have money for a rainy day. Healthcare ain't cheap

Maybe he lives in a developed country so has access to state healthcare.

2006 article

"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 £30-a-month pension, because he has been unemployed since December."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1526782/Worlds-top-maths-gen...

They even changed the rules for the Fields Medal so that he would be eligible. Technically the arXiv document was a preprint, and the Fields Medal was for published research.

Sensibly, that rule was changed.

As someone who follows (or tries to) the cutting edge in machine learning and data analysis I have found that I often see really useful ideas on arxiv first which may latter appear in some form somewhere else (conference, journal).

Conversely some more prestigious/general interest journals like science and nature tend to favor papers based on novelty in a way which often results in them highlighting an interesting problem domain but not a best-in-class method. Indeed they often reject follow up pieces that improve on the published method.

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