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

Re:perhaps he has the best reward there is

[affliction]

At this point, in fact, the bulk of us are starting to get pretty damn sick and tired of both those SUV-driving narcissistic fuckwits that we have to contend with on the way to work every day, and judgmental foreigners that insist upon treating America (of all countries) as a monolithic culture.

I am getting pretty sick and tired of being stereotyped as a fuckwit for driving an SUV. Maybe I want something that I can drive in the hills or I can haul things around if I need to. Do you ever need to move anything big? Does it fit in your Toyota Hybrid? No? Well, then you better go borrow your friend's SUV. But, you don't have any friends with SUVs because they are all fuckwits.

Next time, pick some other characteristic instead of owning an SUV, like ranting about SUV owning fuckwits.

Re:perhaps he has the best reward there is

[Dixie_Flatline]

Yes, thank you for the nice lecture. That you can type a coherent sentence and sound high-handed about this whole thing doesn't change the perception of your country by the rest of the world at all.

Frankly, I suspect your entire response to me as being ironic; nobody would describe Bush as a 'moderate conservative' -- especially not his supporters.

Amusingly, the person looking back out of the mirror at me is someone that's half-Chinese, and half-White-Russian. I briefly felt bad about the bad-mouthing of a Chinese mathematician, since I feel no small amount of pride when I hear about Chinese doing well in the world, but then I remembered that every country and race fields its share of jerks.

Face facts: nobody likes Bush. Electing him again made your country look really bad in the eyes of the world. Whether or not you think this is fair, whether or not you think that Bush really is the 'moderate conservative' that you claim him to be -- neither of those things matter. Your country has a long standing reputation for wasteful imperialism. Crying to me that it isn't fair doesn't change that.

Finally, I don't think that Canada has done any better a job fixing any sort of environmental crisis than the US. My province (Alberta) still shamelessly kowtows to the big oil companies raping the land around the oil sands, worried that raising taxes or imposing any sort of meaningful environmental restrictions will cause them to spontaneously generate and move to another massive source of oil somewhere else in the world. Stephen Harper, our current Prime Minister is from southern Alberta, and has the outward appearance of an unfeeling, yet evil, robot bent on doing meaningless fiddling in the guise of getting some work done. I have no shortage of criticism for my fellow citizens and their capacity to pick up on the worst kinds of American behaviours that they no doubt learn from sitting in front of the television far too much. Don't take my criticism of your country and my attempt to explain where all these nasty off-hand comments come from as some sort of tacit approval of every other system out there. I've read the history books and I know the good your country and your people have done. Your lecturing only feeds the stereotypes that everyone holds.