Slashdot Mirror
Mathematician Claims New Yorker Defamed Him
An anonymous reader writes, "Last month the New Yorker ran the article 'Manifold Destiny' (slashdotted here), by Sylvia Nasar, author of 'A Beautiful Mind.' Now a renowned Harvard mathematics professor, Dr. Shing-Tung Yau, is claiming the article defamed him. His attorney wrote the New Yorker a letter (PDF) threatening that Yau will have 'no choice but to consider other options' if Nasar, her co-author, and the New Yorker fail to undo the damage done."
everybody sues nowadays!
^(oo)^pig~
I thought it was the mathematics and physics guys who'd be bringing us the time machine, not the New Yorker...
This guy's the limit!
At least the New Yorker didn't denormal him...
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
New Yorker article was more than 1000 words. BORING.
Bitchy PDF is whiny and lengthy too.
Slashdot desperately needs better users and more boobies...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Doesn't this prove the article's point?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
This looks like a well calculated attack and response by a few mathematicians with a lawyer thrown in to check the work.
Ill give 2:1 odds that the lawyer has checked the proofs and found that the math is wrong because no one else added in the cash coefficient. He will keep the cash for him self and may give a small percentage of the proceeds to the mathematician if the mathematician can figure it out.
Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shing-Tung_Yau and the New Yorker piece. Yau supposledy tried to take credit for Perelmans work on the Poincare conjecture, publishing a solution after Perelman published his on arxiv, calling Perelmans 'incomplete' and saying he and his students didn't understand it.
I'm not far enough along in my math studies (will I ever be?) to understand their papers, but if it's true Yau is pretty sleazy.
New Yorker can rest. Yun is famous again now that Slashdot and other web sites are printing his lawyer's words.
Full Tilt
Hell hath no fury like an academic with his reputation scorned.
ian
Nah, Tom, you just need better drugs, then all this will become completely fascinating. I've found that old coots like us need a high dose of dammitol and gedawfmaielauntin just to get through boring crap like this.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
He complained she wrote too much about his sex life, with some of it exaggerated. If you believe Sylvia's book he had lots of girlfriends and few boyfriends too.
Whats Nash up to these days?
While the New Yorker article was not particularly favorable to Dr. Yau, it didn't seem to me that it could be called defamation. Indeed, to the extent that it says negative things about him, they seem to be coming from his peers in mathematics - and not from the writer of the article. Is that a sufficient defense against a legal claim of defamation? I guess that is for the courts to decide.
More importantly, by suing for defamation, Dr. Yau appears to be manifesting exactly the kind of behavior that he was described as having in the article. One mathematician is quoted as saying "Yau wants to be the king of geometry. He believes that everything should issue from him, that he should have oversight. He doesn't like people encroaching on his territory.". Another says : "This is a guy who did magnificent things... He won every prize to be won. I find it a little mean of him to seem to be trying to get a share of this as well."
- Everything you say is all lies
- All of the events you quote were staged for the purpose of generating all lies
- Everything everyone else says is all lies, or, if it is true, is taken out of context in such a way as to become all lies
While I, of course, speak only the truth.Barbara Streisand in Full Effect!
When will people learn that this sort of thing only draws more publicity and if they wanted it to go away they would just ignore it.
In other news, Dr. Yau is suing Slashdot and OSTG for damage done to his reputation by an Anonymous Coward who reportedly stated, "Yau is a big jerk!" in a recent posting.
The article also stole the title from one of my favorite cooking books. Damn confusing, that.
Who cares? Some professor of Math gets his knickers in a twist because he's been outted as a self-aggrandizing, self-important weasel by his peers, only confirming his peers' extimation of him, and this is important? Somebody get this guy some Xanax and a legal dictionary then send him off to some nice, quiet, restful place where he can contemplate geometry and leave the rest of us alone.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
New Yorkers defame me all the time. You just have to build a thick skin to live here, that's all.
Dictionaries are for loosers.
The essential gist of the story is that the chinese mathematician didn't prove anything but merely re-hashed the Russian's work but it trying to take the actually credit for proving what has already been proved.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
why does the guy bother? he's got a maths degree, and works at harvard. why the hell does he care if some journalist spreads proverbial shite about his theory. presumably the theory has gone through the channels to become legitimate and several other mathmaticians have also proofed the piece. he's obvously bored, or its a bit of a stunt to get people to read the theory, and the journalist is basically fanning the flames.
dont like jounralists. agreed, speading the proverbial does rake in the money, but i have to wonder at how much consideration there is for others...
if the guy's theory is flawed, then surely it be best that someone does flag discrepencies in it...
As much as I read from the comments, I can see that very very few of us have a grasp of the ins and outs, who did what, and what it all mean. Can someone actually in the field, somewhat familiar with the subject say something more objective and insightful?
Let the Brit sci-fi Jokes commence.
Guys who have more ego than brains, they're smart enough to be in the top ten percent, but they just can't make it to the very top. No one will say they're not smart or hard working, but they're just not Geniuses they're not Inspired as it were. So they become bitter and nasty and make their grad students lives a living hell (as well as that of anyone around them) because they can't accept being second best. Yau is a very smart man, yes, but he will never be what he wants to be and stealing credit for Poincare is really just pathetic. He hopes in a hundred years no one will remember that, but they will.
What's really sad is that this goes on all the time, I've heard stories of it from Physicists more than once. Science and Math are not without their politics and the infighting can be incredibly nasty.
A professor rides the back of his students' work and findings?! Say it ain't so.
Nope, never been there. Never ever had a prof do that...o.k., maybe...I'm not bitter.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Whee... I love Slashdot readers! As usual, nobody feels obliged to read the original article, or the response, before blasting thier commentary. Dr. Yau isn't just some Harvard mathematician; he's heavily connected into Chinese politics and education. The article, if true, suggests that he's built that base on stealing the work of others. This isn't defaming his math career; this is going to cause enormous damage politically, if it's true.
I'm not claiming it's true or not -- there are two totally opposing views, neither with particularly good evidence. But before you're all "lol lawyerz are teh suck", figure out what's going on.
For those who don't want to read the entire article, try the much shortened haiku version. It's the fourth haiku down.
If the people who provided the original quotes used against Yau, now say they were misquoted and don't agree with the premise, then I think its a valid case. I think as in most things the truth lies in the middle. The title of the paper " The first complete solution to Poicare" says more than any of the quotes or anything else. Its very clear from that title that the authors are saying that Perlman didn't solve it completely. The Jounalist who wrote the New Yorker had a somewhat borring story about academia and the quest for recognition and tried spicing it up a little bit. She may have crossed the ethincal line while doing so. A lot of Research papersmake grandiose claims that aren't as true as they initially seem. They relaise they need to market their papers to get the next job or grant or whatever and they need their papers to sound important to the vast majority of people who don't understand what the paper is really about.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
so all they have to do is write an apology article or put a picture of him in saying he's the best and no money for him. Is he just doing this for publicity or what?
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
Now it is Moneyfold Destiny for Dr Yau. Dr Yau just proved that he is 50% mathematician and 60% somebody else who does not like to be caught.
I've read all the posts up to now, and most are overlooking what I think is an important fact.
The Clay Institute has put up a bounty of one million US dollars for a proof of this conjecture.
There seems to be a good chance that Perelman will decline it (or his share of it), given his behavior.
This may be a factor in Yau's rush to get a share of the credit. He's famous enough that he doesn't really need to do this to improve reputation.
I have no choice but to choose something.
God spoke to me.
There really is a Rita Skeeter.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
If someone said that you steal other people's work, and fabricate quotes, and take what others said and use it out of context to defame you. .. and also claim that you are overprotective of your reputation ..
Wouldnt you sue? Or would you let a bitch author live off defaming people? (Now watch she'll probably try to sue me for having that opinion).
But then you'll have idiots like yourself falling into the trap of not examining the evidence and saying "hmm, yeah he does seem overprotective of his reputation". I guess it's a perfect plan to take advantage of the sizable number of single point trigger morons who think they're smart.
You didnt even read the attorney's letter did you?
nobody feels obliged to read the original article
That includes you, it seems.
The article, if true, suggests that he's built that base on stealing the work of others.
It suggests no such thing. It makes it clear that Yau has accomplished enough to be regarded as one of the greats. (He won the Fields medal 24 years ago, for $deity's sake.) What it suggests is that he is not satisfied with those accomplishments and wants a share of the limelight in other work too.
He's not suing, jackass. He's asking the New Yorker to work with him to reverse the damage they have done to his reputation.
If nothing else, read the last page of the PDF. But really, you should read all the material before you start typing your reply.
From the original article:
Seems to be pretty even handed journalism to me. Theft of ideas is not a light matter for such an important problem.
an ill wind that blows no good
Yau is an extremely brilliant mathematician who has proven, amongst others, The positive energy theorem and has received the Fields medal (the Nobel prize of math) for his work.
I can't believe you were modded +5 Interesting for this, but then again, this is slashdot, where shortsighted blanket statements are more interesting than hard facts. Sigh ...
That legal thing sure uses a lot of "quotes". It makes it seem "unprofessional" to me, although I am not a "lawyer".
Begging the question, why do you care enough about slashdot posters to deride them?
Maybe you should read the article. Yau has done magnificient work. It's just that recently he has tried to claim a little more credit (even when it's on behalf of his students) than appropriate, and that he is more ambitious about getting political influence than what's the norm in the math community, and maybe more than his peers are willing to accept.
Some of what he did is wrong, but it's not like he doesn't deserve his job at Harvard or his Fields medal.
IANAL, but I worked as an editor at daily newspapers for many years, and as part of that process got to sit through more than few briefings from media company lawyers about libel and defamation. Laws vary from state to state, but the key issues for newsroom employees in defending a contested story usually focus on "absence of malice" (i.e. the reporter wasn't "out to get" the subject) and the amount of care taken in the process of preparing and editing the story, and that there wasn't "reckless disregard" for the accuracy of facts.
The lawyer's letter makes it appear that the New Yorker was provided with accounts contesting key parts of the article prior to publication. How the competing accounts on a contested fact are reviewed and balanced is often significant. If the subject of a story or their advocates contest a fact prior to publication, the practice is normally to include their version of events out of fairness to the source. The lawyer is alleging that the New Yorker didn't do this. Is this a legitimate editorial decision or an actionable error? That's one for the lawyers. It will be interesting to see if the New Yorker responds in print.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
I've read both the original article and the lawyer letter and must say that the amount of counter-evidence to that presented in the New Yorker is significant. Even if it doesn't receive a judgement as libel, it is, at the very least, shoddy journalism. After reading the original article, my reaction was that Yau was fairly sleazy (on the assumption that everything written therein is true). However, soon after publication of the article, many of those quoted came forward publicly and claimed they were misquoted or quoted out of context. I doubt if Yau has the power to intimidate each of these mathematicians to his will. What recourse does he have against a large internationally circulated publication like the New Yorker? In the lawyer letter it asks only for a corrective/apology in the magazine (and corollary web sites and blogs) and correction of false statements. He wishes to undo the damage done. If they tell him to buzz off, then he will sue for defamation. - Paul
Adonis?
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
"...Yau will have 'no choice but to consider other options'..." Clearly he has the mathematician's flair for nontechnical communication.
This isn't the first time that he's used failure to understand portions of proofs to piggyback on others by collaborating to fill non-holes in proofs.
Part of this is due to the obscenely political state of modern mathematics. Part of it is the silly amount of credit given to people willing to do the grunt work of filling out proofs, even though it's important. Still, a great deal of this has to be put on Yau and his strong-arm, slap-dash tactics. It doesn't help that the accusation of the portrayal of a racial stereotype is contained within fulfillment of the accused behavior, but Nasar never said that Chinese mathematicians are dirty, cheating bastards. She said that Yau is.
Yau's press-release shows how much he believes he represents Chinese mathematics. A statement disparaging Yau does the same for Chinese mathematicians?
Please.
There's nothing racial about someone spending the latter half of his life manipulating a broken system when his actual intellect is insufficient.
So Yau et al are "clean-up men" for Perelman? I can see them, with their Dirichlet dustbrooms and Gauss garbage cans, cleaning and polishing the equipment that the "great master of old" left. Rifling through his lab notes one of them yells "Hey, let's publish a paper about this...".
However, what I find more interesting is the light it shed on how Nasar did her excellent research for this article; it's not like it is easy to get scientists speak openly about one of their most famous and influential peers. Giving them some quotes by Yau, etc. (Yau's claim that she misled them is baseless, IMO -- nobody makes a statement to a journalist about someone he has know well for 30 years just based on a single reported quote; it's just that she got them to talk openly.)
I found it funny how Yau believed she would be captivated by being able to talk with Hawking - something many uninformed journalists would get excited about, whereas Nasar knew well that Hawking didn't have any insights relevant to her article. I just loved to read how she cleverly played along with the cliche... (I don't know why journalists, and slashdot included, still blow Hawking so much out of proportion, but that's another story...)
The judge will defame him too.
Yau is not a thief. If he were, he would have had his name on the Cao-Zhu paper as a co-author, and the paper would have claimed to give the first proof of the Poincare Conjecture. He did not. The New Yorker article if offensive to many Chinese mathematicians, not just Yau. See this comment for details.
Hmmm... "I'd better go back through my recent Poincare Project posts to make sure I haven't assumed the simple connectedness of S^1" (from the blog).
Somehow, I don't think he'll be getting to the nitty-gritty of Perelman's proof any time soon...
Why should I read any "article"? There's nothing in there about how much smarter than everyone else on the internet I am.
Too true! I often had the idea that Kool Moe Dee and MC Hammer should have taken
their beef on tour.
It has only been 30 days since the article came out! Remember, you first have to gather your facts .. I mean .. even if you know something is false .. you still have to call up the folks that a person quoted/misquoted and verify things. Make sure you have a strong case that the person KNOWINGLY defamed you. Also, it's not accepted practice to file a lawsuit without first asking if the person or magazine is willing to issue a retraction etc. without going through a dragged out courts process. If you read the attorney's letter .. you'll see it's fairly well researched. Anyway .. none of this matters, cause I doubt you even want to know the truth.
Umm, the lawsuit alleges a lot of what she did was sneaky in order to paint a nasty picture of Yau. She knowingly used false information. Why dont you read the letter? Apparently she's not brilliant .. she just exploits trust .. not just Yau's but of others she interviewed and miscontrued their statements.
No, the poster knows exactly what he is talking about. However now that the china contingent has waded in we see that he's getting modded down even though he does not deserve that.
The truth hurts apparently.
Dear Doctor Yau, I truly enjoyed listening to your speech in the webcast I found on your site, www.doctoryau.com. Thanks a lot. I now wish you, Doctor Yau, a very good day.
Dr. Yau's reputation being besmirched by a bumbling junior writer at the New Yorker is really way too much. The lack of fact-finding and ignorance that went into this article is a crime. Dr. Yau certainly didn't deserve this treatment. Apparently the New Yorker is a tabloid who targets more sophisticated subjects. I fully expect to see them do their next piece on Rosanne Barr's large buttocks.
"We would like to correct our references to Dr. Yau.
Dr. Yau should be referred to as "Dr. Yau, PhD, Whiney Bitch"
The New Yorker is legendary in the publishing industry for hyper-diligent fact-checking bordering on paranoia. AFAIK they have never had a Jason Blair situation, nor do I recall them ever publishing a retraction in the quarter-century or so I've been reading it. They even fact check their cartoons! If this brouhaha actually progresses to the courtroom, this will be as big a story as the alleged trasgression itself.
Whose the greater scientist:
1) the one who invents something new or
2) the one who communicates an obscure idea so that everybody else can understand.
IMHO the latter.
In it, he claims there was never any battle, and that his paper merely established the "first complete proof applying [Perelman's] and Professor Hamilton's work." But if I understand my mathematics nomenclature correctly, isn't that the exact act of trying to establish priority? He's actually saying, "I've (or my students have) PROVED the theorem, Perelman and Hamilton have both done work allowing me to do so." Of course, since what Perelman did is considered by many mathematicians to actually BE the first complete proof, Yau's letter essentially confirms what he's being accused of doing. The fight is about who has the first complete proof, not how much recognition Perelman should have been received in the paper.
Legally, this sounds like a lot of hot air. The letter isn't a legal document, and well-established precedents in defamation law protect journalists in cases such as this where the event is easily newsworthy and the people involved have become public figures. Yau is relying less on any legal basis he has, and more on being able to use the letter as evidence that he's outraged by his portrayal in the article.
Perlman really did some outstanding work on this one and the main stream Mathematics comunity backs him up. It is strange that Yua, a fields medalist himself, who has experienced truth on a deeper level than the vast majority of the population can not see the truth of his own behavior.
Lawyer: Hi, I'm calling from the Law Office representing your esteemed peer Dr. Lau of Harvard University.
... uhh ... Hello. What can I do for you?
... How absolutely absurd!
... I've got to work in this academic community too.
Source: Yes
Lawyer: Did you lie about the good Dr. Yau to a reporter?
Source: Of course not! I would never do that
Lawyer: Dr. Yau is poised to sue everyone who has said anything bad about him. This is slated to be a *really big* academic scandal.
Source: I'm not involved! IF SOMEONE SAID I SPOKE BADLY OF YAU IT'S A LIE!!!
Lawyer: Well, that's great. We all knew the reporter with no prior connection to him was just trying unreasonably to make him look bad.
Source: (privately) Gawd. That vindictive bastard will stop at nothing to get his way! He goes public with everything in a big way! I hope I can stay on his good side.
Slimy hairy layers, money, lawsuits, fame.....Is Lau a Californian? Maybe Red China is taking a lesson in making money from Red California - Claim that every negative remark made about you is a lie, and sue everybody who doesn't like or agree with you.
Wow, I though China just had everybody who spoke against them dragged into the street and shot. I guess the profitability of moving from executions to lawsuits finally got through to them. Red China taking tips from Red California? Yikes!
I want to give credit to the individual who uses this as his sig, but I forgot his SlashDot User name, so I apologize for not listing their name. I think this is PERFECT for the situation at hand:
"Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue." - SlashDot user (ID forgotten)
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
In their paper: "A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures - application of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of the Ricci flow" Yau's students Cao and Zhu claim the following in their abstract:
"Abstract. In this paper, we give a complete proof of the Poincaré and the geometrization conjectures. This work depends on the accumulative works of many geometric analysts in the past thirty years. This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci flow."
In other words they are claiming credit for the Poincaré proof ("the crowning achievement"), when their work consists of merely filling out the details of Perelman's proof. Nasar's article in this respect does not appear inaccurate.
They're *his* students. He supervised and directed their work. He helped write the paper. The fact that his name is not there is not relevant. They're his students, they reflect on him.
..."
... this does. It fails to state that gap-plugging papers, as this one is supposed to be, are not *crowning achievements* because they add nothing new. It fails to state that the paper is not based on the Ricci flow theory, but on Perleman's proof. That is really the worst part. It's like "hey, nice proof Perleman. Now that we read it, let's rewrite it in our own words, and say that we rewrote it based on the Ricci theory, and that we never read yours (do you even exist?!?)"
Now, for claim of giving first proof, let's read the abstract, shall we?
"Abstract. In this paper, we give a complete proof of the Poincaré and the geometrization conjectures. This work depends on the accumulative works of many geometric analysts in the past thirty years. This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci flow."
"We give a complete proof of
It doesn't say the *first* complete proof, that's true, but...
"This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci flow."
You can argue all you want that that was not their *intention*, but hell is full of people with good intentions. This is a mathematical paper. By definition, it is logical, precise. There are no underlying *intentions*. If they meant the paper as being merely to expand and fill the gaps that Perleman didn't on his proof, they would have said so. They didn't. They claimed it was a crowning achievement based on a theory Perleman himself based his work on. So they skipped over Perleman, essentially.
It's a big load of stinky poo to me. And, for all intents and purposes, it's stealing. And what everyone realizes, wisely and objectively, is that, though his students have their name on it, Yau is the one at fault. As they should. And as you should too, independently of whether you're chinese or not.
And you should realize as well that any scientist of any country might have done the same thing. This is not a question of being chinese or not. Human nature is human nature, and Dr. Yau has been displaying his nature for quite some time now. Honesty and integrity are universal, as are greed and selfishness. And honor. Look deep into Yau's actions, and tell me with a straight face that he has been honourable, honest and integral throughout all this process.
I like the new sytem in general, showing the start of modded down posts makes it alot easier to look back and see what other posts are refering to.
The one problem I have is with the floating pane on the left. It may be because I don't load images on slashdot, but the background of this pane is transparent on my display, making it quite hard to read.
Let us not lose sight of one of the most important claims made against Prof Yau by the New Yorker investigative report at issue.
True or false, did Yau publish the Cao and Zhu paper WITHOUT peer review? Considering Yau has such a personal interest in this topic and Cau was reportedly his phd student, we deserve an answer. Have any editorial members publicly refuted the New Yorker article's claim that;
"On April 13th of this year, the thirty-one mathematicians on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Mathematics received a brief e-mail from Yau and the journal's co-editor informing them that they had three days to comment on a paper by Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao titled "The Hamilton-Perelman Theory of Ricci Flow: The Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures," which Yau planned to publish in the journal. The e-mail did not include a copy of the paper, reports from referees, or an abstract. At least one board member asked to see the paper but was told that it was not available." (New Yorker, Nasser, Gruber).
2. Did the title of Cao and Zhu's manuscript really change at the last moment?
The New Yorker article claims the title was changed from:
"The Hamilton-Perelman Theory of Ricci Flow: The Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures"
to
"Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures - Application of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of the Ricci flow."
If the above is true, then Prof Yau has some explaining to do!
I've said it before: these figures can make sense if some of the work was duplicated. I.e. if 5% of the work got done twice.
Not to mention that the figures are qualified as approximations, and the estimates may come from different sources for each figure.
(1) In Ms. Nasar's article with Mr. Gruber, she labeled both Professors Shing-Tung Yau and Shiing-Shen Chern as "the Chinese mathematician". In fact, both are U.S. citizens born in China. It is important to note that only mathematicians of Chinese heritage were labeled this way in the article. This labeling is in contrary to the common practice of using the term "Chinese American mathematician" in the mainstream news media in both the U.S. and China. (In Chinese media, Yau and Chern are called "mei ji hua ren"-U.S. citizen of Chinese heritage.) Ms. Nasar went to length to describe the contributions of Yau and Chern to the scientific development in China but neglected to mention that both were awarded this nation's highest scientific honor, the National Medal of Science. The subliminal message is that both Yau and Chern work only to advance the Chinese interest. Such bigotry is nothing new in this country: Jewish people have been subject to such stereotype for a long time. (2) While there were extensive discussions on original ideas in mathematics in this 14-page long article, not a single sentence, as far as I know, associated mathematicians of Chinese heritage to originality. Even the originality of Yau's Fields Medal work was downplayed. This article promotes the false and harmful stereotypes that mathematicians of Chinese heritage are "technical" but not "original". (See an open letter to Ms. Nasar for more detail on this point.) (3) Seven mathematicians of Chinese heritage were named in the article: Yau, Chern, Gang Tian, Huai-Dong Cao, Xi-Ping Zhu, Kefeng Liu, Bong H. Lian (implicitly, as the coauthor of Liu and Yau). While there was only minimal coverage on Chern, all six others were alleged, one way or another, to involve in plagiary and/or claiming undeserved credits. More importantly, in the article, no other mathematicians but only those of Chinese heritage were alleged to involve of such unethical practices. This is biased, prejudiced, and, in fact, racist. To illustrate this point, substitute all Chinese names by Jewish names, China by Israel, and Chinese by Jewish. This article would then have been easily recognized as anti-Semitic. (4) This is not the first time Ms. Nasar spews anti-Chinese venom. In her article Best Business Book 2003: Globalization, she promoted the book World on Fire by Amy Chua. Here is what Ms. Nasar wrote:
This is bigotry, pure and simple. It is now well established that Ms. Nasar distorted other people's statements to fit her own agenda. ("As it appears in her article, she has purposefully distorted my statement and made it unforgivably misleading." ---Dan Stroock of MIT.) There were also controversies regarding Ms. Nasar's A Beautiful Mind about the anti-Semitic statements that she attributed to Mr. John Nash. (See, for example, An Anti-Semitic Mind? by Tom Tugent at The Jewish Journal.)We all have limited intellect, and how we choose to address the limits of our abilities is where I have a problem with Yau's behavior. I don't think that he's some sort of math pretender in the general sense. He definitely has serious mathematical chops, but what he's done when his considerable (but, yes, limited) intellect has come up short is over-inflate his contributions, or those of his students or colleagues, and fail to credit others appropriately. It's not about who you believe. This is information on the face of his behavior and on his own writings. It's definitely not unique to him, but that doesn't make it any better. We shouldn't give Yau a pass for ugly behavior because of the race card.
Posting behind AC and saying that the New Yorker article is my only source of information when I've been following geometrization off and on for the last ten years is just silly. There's no merit in being counter to the prevailing sentiment when the prevailing sentiment stands so much in the right.
I had a professor tell me once after I'd been a hot-head: "The thing you need to learn is that absolutely every endeavor is political." It took several years, and plenty of hot-headed exchanges, for the weight of that to sink in, but he was right. Maybe Yau just needs to learn to be more subtle.
Prof. Richard Hamilton, Columbia Univ., responds to the New Yorker article, September 25, 2006 http://doctoryau.com/hamiltonletter.pdf Howard M Cooper Todd & Weld LLP 28 State Street, Boston, MA 02109 Direct Dial (617) 624-4713 / Fax (617) 227-5777 hcooper@toddweld.com September 25, 2006 Dear Mr. Cooper I am very disturbed by the unfair manner in which Yau Shing-Tung has been portrayed in the New Yorker article. I am providing my thoughts below to set the record straight. I authorize you to share this letter with the New Yorker and the public if that will be helpful to Yau. As soon as my first paper on the Ricci Flow on three dimensional manifolds with positive Ricci curvature was complete in the early '80's,Yau immediately recognized it's importance;and although I had proved a result on which he had been working with minimal surfaces,rather than exhibit any jealosy he became my strongest supporter.He pointed out to me way back then that the Ricci Flow would form the neck pinch singularities,undoing the connected sum decomposition,and that this could lead to a proof of the Poincare conjecture. In 1985 he brought me to UC San Diego together with Rick Schoen and Gerhard Huisken,and we had a very exciting and productive group in Geometric Analysis.Huisken was working on the Mean Curvature Flow for hypersurfaces,which closely parallels the Ricci Flow,being the most natural flows for intrinsic and extrinsic curvature respectively.Yau repeatedly urged us to study the blow-up of singularities in these parabolic equations using techniques parallel to those developed for elliptic equations like the minimal surface equation,on which Yau and Rick are experts.Without Yau's guidance and support at this early stage,there would have been no Ricci Flow program for Perelman to finish. Yau also had some outstanding students at San Diego who had come with him from Princeton, in particular Cao Huai-Dong,Ben Chow and Shi Wan- Xiong. Yau encouraged them to work on the Ricci Flow,and all made very important contributions to the field.Cao proved existence for all time for the normalized Ricci Flow in the canonical Kaehler case ,and convergence for zero or negative Chern class.Cao's results form the basis for Perelman's exciting work on the Kaehler Ricci Flow,where he shows for positive Chern class that the diameter and scalar curvature are bounded. Ben Chow,in addition to excellent work on other flows,extended my work on the Ricci Flow on the two dimensional sphere to the case of curvature of varying sign.Shi Wan- Xiong pioneered the study of the Ricci Flow on complete noncompact manifolds,and in addition to many beautiful arguments he proved the local derivative estimates for the Ricci Flow.The blow-up of singularities usually produces noncompact solutions,and the proof of convergence to the blow-up limit always depends on Shi's derivative estimates; so Shi's work is central to all the limit arguments Perelman and I use.
In '82 Yau and Peter Li wrote an exceedingly important paper giving a pointwise differential inequality for linear heat equations which can be integrated along curves to give classic Harnack inequalities. Yau repeatedly urged me to study this paper,and based on their approach I was able to prove Harnack inequalities for the Ricci Flow and for the Mean Curvature Flow. This Harnack inequality,generalized from Li-Yau,forms the basis for the analysis of ancient solutions which I started, and which Perelman completed and uses as the basic tool in his canonical neighborhood theorem. Cao Huai-Dong proved the Harnack estimate for the Ricci Flow in the Kahler case,and Ben Chow did the same for the Yamabe Flow and the Gauss Curvature Flow.
But there is more to this story. Perelman's most important is his noncollapsing result for Ricci Flow,valid in all dimensions,not just three,and thus one whose importance for the future extends well beyond the Poincare conjecture,where it is the tool for ruling out cigars,the one part of the singularity classification
Prof. Richard Hamilton, Columbia Univ., responds to the New Yorker article, September 25, 2006
,and convergence for zero or negative Chern class.Cao's results form the basis for Perelman's exciting work on the Kaehler Ricci Flow,where he shows for positive Chern class that the diameter and scalar curvature are bounded. Ben Chow,in addition to excellent work on other flows,extended my work on the Ricci Flow on the two dimensional sphere to the case of curvature of varying sign.Shi Wan- Xiong pioneered the study of the Ricci Flow on complete noncompact manifolds,and in addition to many beautiful arguments he proved the local derivative estimates for the Ricci Flow.The blow-up of singularities usually produces noncompact solutions,and the proof of convergence to the blow-up limit always depends on Shi's derivative estimates; so Shi's work is central to all the limit arguments Perelman and I use.
http://doctoryau.com/hamiltonletter.pdf
Howard M Cooper
Todd & Weld LLP
28 State Street, Boston, MA 02109
Direct Dial (617) 624-4713 / Fax (617) 227-5777
hcooper@toddweld.com
September 25, 2006
Dear Mr. Cooper
I am very disturbed by the unfair manner in which Yau Shing-Tung has been portrayed in the New Yorker article. I am providing my thoughts below to set the record straight. I authorize you to share this letter with the New Yorker and the public if that will be helpful to Yau.
As soon as my first paper on the Ricci Flow on three dimensional manifolds with positive Ricci curvature was complete in the early '80's,Yau immediately recognized it's importance;and although I had proved a result on which he had been working with minimal surfaces,rather than exhibit any jealosy he became my strongest supporter.He pointed out to me way back then that the Ricci Flow would form the neck pinch singularities,undoing the connected sum decomposition,and that this could lead to a proof of the Poincare conjecture. In 1985 he brought me to UC San Diego together with Rick Schoen and Gerhard Huisken,and we had a very exciting and productive group in Geometric Analysis.Huisken was working on the Mean Curvature Flow for hypersurfaces,which closely parallels the Ricci Flow,being the most natural flows for intrinsic and extrinsic curvature respectively.Yau repeatedly urged us to study the blow-up of singularities in these parabolic equations using techniques parallel to those developed for elliptic equations like the minimal surface equation,on which Yau and Rick are experts.Without Yau's guidance and support at this early stage,there would have been no Ricci Flow program for Perelman to finish.
Yau also had some outstanding students at San Diego who had come with him from Princeton, in particular Cao Huai-Dong,Ben Chow and Shi Wan- Xiong. Yau encouraged them to work on the Ricci Flow,and all made very important contributions to the field.Cao proved existence for all time for the normalized Ricci Flow in the canonical Kaehler case
In '82 Yau and Peter Li wrote an exceedingly important paper giving a pointwise differential inequality for linear heat equations which can be integrated along curves to give classic Harnack inequalities. Yau repeatedly urged me to study this paper,and based on their approach I was able to prove Harnack inequalities for the Ricci Flow and for the Mean Curvature Flow. This Harnack inequality,generalized from Li-Yau,forms the basis for the analysis of ancient solutions which I started, and which Perelman completed and uses as the basic tool in his canonical neighborhood theorem. Cao Huai-Dong proved the Harnack estimate for the Ricci Flow in the Kahler case,and Ben Chow did the same for the Yamabe Flow and the Gauss Curvature Flow.
But there is more to this story. Perelman's most important is his noncollapsing result for Ricci Flow,valid in all dimensions,not just three,and thus one whose importance for the future extends well beyond the Poincare conjecture,where it is the tool fo