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."

Comments

Yau

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yau

[Coryoth]

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.

There's a blog called the Poincare project that is seeking to build up enough math, from the ground up, to understand the proof. So far it's only just past stating the conjecture (which still takes a lot of work if you're going to cover all the technical material required to state it properly), but it's pretty god work and understandable by most anyone.

Re:Yau

[Andy Dodd]

"And so, modern mathematics, unwilling to give the Fields medal to the intuative but not pedatic Perelman, but unable to give it to the super garbled Morgan and Tian, instead had to give it to Yau. But since Yau hadn't actually added anything but formality to the proof, and the other team and only added more, they had to give the medal to Perelman as well. They would have preferred to have just given it to Morgan and Tian, so they're bitter now and blaming Yau for publishing so soon."

I can't comment on the rest of your post, but you got at least one critical fact wrong:

Perelman won the Fields medal, but refused to accept it. The article essentially claimed that all of this corruption and bickering was why Perelman refused the medal - He seemingly wants nothing more to do with the field of mathematics in its current state.

Re:Yau

[aufumy]

From this page http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/2006/08/fruitcak e-fields.html are published clarifications from Nasar's interviewees denouncing her and claiming that she falsely quoted and purposefuly miscontrued their statements.

a Clarification from MIT mathematician Dan Stroock:

I, like several others whom Sylvia Nasar interviewed, am shocked and angered by the article which she and Gruber wrote for the New Yorker. Having seen Yau in action during his June conference on string theory, Nasar led me to believe that she was fascinated by S-T Yau and asked me my opinion about his activities. I told her that I greatly admire Yau's efforts to support young Chinese mathematicians and to break down the ossified power structure in the Chinese academic establishment. I then told her that I sometimes have doubts about his methodology. In particular, I told her that, at least to my ears, Yau weakens his case and lays himself open to his enemies by sounding too self-promoting.

As it appears in her article, she has purposefully distorted my statement and made it unforgivably misleading. Like the rest of us, Yau has his faults, but, unlike most of us, his virtues outweigh his faults. Unfortunately, Nasar used my statement to bolster her case that the opposite is true, and for this I cannot forgive her.

State University of New York at Stony Brook professor Michael Anderson's email to Yao:

Dear Yau,

I am furious, and completely shocked, at what Sylvia Nasar wrote. Her quote of me is completely wrong and baseless. There are other factual mistakes in the article, in addition to those you pointed out.

I have left her phone and email messages this evening and hope to speak to her tomorrow at the latest to clear this up. I want her to remove this statement completely from the article. It serves no purpose and contains no factual information; I view it as stupid gossip unworthy of a paper like the New Yorker. At the moment, the print version has not appeared and so it might be possible to fix this still. I spent several hours with S. Nasar on the phone talking about Perelman, Poincare, etc but it seems I was too naive (and I'm now disgusted) in believing this journalist would report factually.

I regret very much this quote falsely attributed to me and will do what ever I can to have it removed.

I will keep you informed as I know more.

Yours, Michael

Michael Anderson's further announcement:

Many of you have probably seen the New Yorker article by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber on Perelman and the Poincare conjecture.

In many respects, its very interesting and a pleasure to read. However, it contains a number of inaccuracies and downright errors. I spent several hours talking with Sylvia Nasar trying to dissuade her from incorporating the Tian-Yau fights into the article, since it was completely irrelevant and I didn't see the point of dragging readers through the mud. Obviously I was not successful.

The quote attributed to me on Yau is completely inaccurate and distorted from some remarks I made to her in a quite different context; I made it explicit to her that the remarks I was making in that context were purely speculative and had no basis in fact. I did not give her my permission to quote me on this, even with the qualification of speculation.

There are other inaccuracies about Stony Brook. One for instance is the implication that Tian at MIT was the first to invite Perelman to the US to give talks. This is of course false - we at Stony Brook were the firs t to do so. I stressed in my talks with her the role Stony Brook played, yet she focusses on the single talk Grisha gave at Princeton, listing a collection of eminent mathematicians, none of whom is a geometer/topologist.

I was not given an opportunity to set the record straight with the New Yor

Re:Yau

[zen-theorist]

another critical mistake:

And so, modern mathematics, unwilling to give the Fields medal to the intuative but not pedatic Perelman, but unable to give it to the super garbled Morgan and Tian, instead had to give it to Yau. But since Yau hadn't actually added anything but formality to the proof, and the other team and only added more, they had to give the medal to Perelman as well. They would have preferred to have just given it to Morgan and Tian, so they're bitter now and blaming Yau for publishing so soon.

Yau did not receive the (2006) Fields medal for this body of work. he received the Fields medal back in 1982 for his contribution to resolving the Calabi conjecture and other related work. Calabi-Yau manifolds come up in string theory, the new hotbed of expository physics.

Defamation

[jefu]

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."

Re:Hey!

[littlem]

It's true that the Chinese pair did contribute something highly non-trivial in filling in the details left by Perelman, so in this sense it's not unreasonable for Yau to claim a certain amount of credit for this. However, given the past history, he looks an awful lot like someone vociferously aggrieved to have been accused of robbing a bank in New York when he was actually robbing a bank in Chicago at the time.

Suing journalists is high-profile and attracts attention. The effect of these Chinese politics on journal publishing in differential geometry in the US, particularly for young mathematicians forced to tread on egg-shells and play off one ego against another, happens behind the scenes but is far more damaging for our subject in the long-run.

Lawsuit sounds meritless

[TheGuano]

As a graduating law student, I've read a number of these. Yau makes a lot of claims, which may very well be true, but what struck me was the section about how there has been "no battle" over priority for the Poincare proof.

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.