One day in 1966 there was an intellectual shipwreck in the North Sea. The American mathematician Dennis Sullivan He was on the deck of a ship heading to Scandinavia and took advantage of the time to try to solve, with paper and pen, a devilish problem in an unimaginable eight-dimensional space. He was 25 years old and had an exceptional brain on the boil, but he came across an unexpected result. In a fit, he threw his notebook overboard, but he immediately continued thinking and persevered. This Wednesday, Sullivan, born in Port Huron 81 years ago, won the Abel Prize, worth 775,000 euros and considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics.
