New Yorker on Perelman and Poincaré Controversy

b4stard writes "The New Yorker has an interesting article on the recent proof of the Poincaré conjecture and the controversy surrounding it. This is a very nice read, which, among other things, sheds some light on what may have motivated Perelman in refusing to accept the Fields medal." From the article: "The Fields Medal, like the Nobel Prize, grew, in part, out of a desire to elevate science above national animosities. German mathematicians were excluded from the first I.M.U. congress, in 1924, and, though the ban was lifted before the next one, the trauma it caused led, in 1936, to the establishment of the Fields, a prize intended to be 'as purely international and impersonal as possible.'"

Comments

Note in blog margin from Perelman

[L7_]

I have discovered a truely marvelous demonstration of the Poincaré conjecture that this blog is too narrow to contain.

Re:I thought it was because Perelman...

[fimbulvetr]

Give it a rest, Yau.

Re:Some people don't want to be famous

[Sage Gaspar]

No kidding. The real losers here are the students who are going to get shafted when all the topology texts release new editions for a footnote :P

Re:There's no controversy

[Anonymous Coward]

if it were easy to understand, it's likely someone would have trivially solved it earlier.

There's a similar story about Feynman when he got the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics. At a lunchen given in his honor, he was asked by his introducer to explain in simple terms what his work was about. He answered, "Madam, if I were able to explain it in simple terms, they wouldn't have given me the Nobel Prize for it."