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."
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)
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.Well, mathematically, the probability of winning or getting a large cash settlement must be high. Unless this guy flunked gambling theory. Either way, the lawyer will walk away richer anyway.
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
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.
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.
Ummm....In 1982 Yau was awarded the Fields Medal, the highest award in mathematics. And you are saying he just can't be in the very top. Yeah...ok.
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.
Isn't pointing that out a bit redundant in itself? If not, I want to see my lawyer anyway! :P
Not 'in the top' at the top. Yau is a smart man, I've already said that, and winning the Fields Medal was a big event for him. But it wasn't enough. Fields Medal winners don't end up in the Math books really. Or the History books (except as side notes). People who solve things like Poincare however get proofs and other such things named after them that people will study and remember for centuries.
Do you see the difference? Yau is driven to be at the very top of the pyramid, he wants people to know who he was hundreds of years from now, he wants people studying Math to Know his name. And to be honest I applaud him for his drive, however this whole thing should be beneath him and that he did it does not speak well of him. I've seen this before, brilliant young minds become average older ones. I fear that Yau may have gone the same way and no longer be the bright man he once was, but merely an embittered hack. And that in its own way is a tragic story too. His trying to take credit for the Poincare solution was lame. This lawsuit is just pathetic.
Science and Math should not take place in courtrooms.
If the New Yorker article contains falsehoods (which I believe it does), AND the statements were knowlingly false to the author (or they were included due to negligent research by the author), then I don't think the law suit is pathetic. Protecting ones reputation, especially when you are a big name involved with political issues in China, is important.
Why cant we all get along
Because there is more money to be made in not getting along.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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
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".
And that is why Grisha Perelman cut himself off. He just did not want to get ugly to deal with politics in math community. Here is his quote in New Yorker article: "As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice, either to make some ugly thing--a fuss about the math community's lack of integrity -- or, if I didn't do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit."
Begging the question, why do you care enough about slashdot posters to deride them?
That doesn't quite fit on Yau. He IS on the top. Proving Calabi's conjecture alone did ensure him a place in the history of mathematics (in fact, it got him a fields medal, seen as the Nobel prize of mathematics by everyone, and I haven't heard anyone claiming he didn't deserve that). Having a job at Harvard and getting many excellent students from China isn't that bad either.
That makes it so hard to understand why he isn't satisfied with that. He has been politically very influential for quite some time (just look at the number of journals for which he is editor on his CV, they are all top journals), but I think with the Perelman story he crossed the line of what his peers would find acceptable.
Unfortunately, from what I have heard, this is sort of true. What I was told is that quite a few of his students had to quit grad school with migraine and/or depressions. However, it's not like he is bitter and nasty to them, probably he is just over-ambitious and pushes them to problems that may be too hard for then. It's not like he is evil.
The thing is, Yau's work is well known in at least some sense to the mathematics community. Calabi-Yau manifolds are named after him, and they are very well known to people who work in fields that use them (such as string theory, or even algebraic geometry). My impression is that he is brilliant, well known, and has accomplished a lot, but that he cannot handle starting work on a problem without getting the lions share of credit when someone finally solves it.
When you are racing to solve a big problem, some people can gracefully step aside when they lose the race. I guess humility isn't for everybody.
alright, I was gonna do a *WHOOSH* - but I guess that was pretty subtle, even by /. standards.
the phrase "Unnecessarily redundant" is intentionally redundant, to provide irony.
Now you are talking about reputation of somebody involved with policitcal issues in China. That Yao got involved too much with his reputation at the expense of achivements of somebody else is why he found himself in this mess. That is exactly how inordinate talents get exploited in any field. Some hack steals the work or gets a handle on the inventor who after that is supposed to care for hack's reputation more then for his own integrity and life. Instead hack should unlearn himself and start caring for his integrity if any left. And you (waxigloo) seem to get it reversed - as Yao did.
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
Adonis?
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
He is at the top, and in the Math books as well. Just do a search on scholar.google.com for Calabi-Yau. About 9190 articles, that's a LOT for mathematics.
"...Yau will have 'no choice but to consider other options'..." Clearly he has the mathematician's flair for nontechnical communication.
Where the hell would you get a judge and jury that could understand the math (assuming it came up)?
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...
Dude...all I said was that if the New Yorker libelled him, then asking for an apology is not pathetic. Personally, I could care less who gets credit for proving Poincare -- what I do care about is the media being responsible for what they print. Whether Yau is a jerk or not, libel is illegal and should be nipped in the bud.
Redundancy is often necessary. Think of how many failure levels are on the space shuttle.
Pah, this is linguistics. It's not like we're rocket surgeons or something.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is that the article isn't discrediting his theory, it's discrediting Yau. The article is pretty much entirely unrelated to math and is about sensationalising supposed infighting between prominent mathmaticians, it's basically tabloid journalism that has nothing to do with the achievements of the people mentioned and everything to do with taking sides in attempt to spread negative feelings about Yau.
I don't know much about the people in question, and even less about the math, but it's pretty damn obvious that the article was slanted against Yau for whatever reason. There were no responses from Yau published, nor any views opposing the idea that he's an old man with little to offer the world, who is desperately scrambling to remain relevant.
I'm sorry, but I fail to believe that there isn't a single person anywhere in the world who thinks that Yau is an OK guy. Even Bill Gates has fans, yet this article would have us believe that Yau is universally dispised and regarded as a publicity hound and plagarist by everyone who knows him.
And why don't you post as non-AC. You obviously care a great deal about the subject.
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.
Language (as speech, not as set of grammar rules) has more levels of redundancy than the space shuttle. This is one reason why data mining is do damn hard, and learning the grammar of a foreign language does not mean you are able to speak it.
:) ".
Example: I suppose you used "rocket surgeons" with the purpose of making a joke, but I cannot be sure. If you want to be as certain as possible that nobody will think you really believe there really are "rocket surgeons", you'll have to give more clues and introduce some redundant stuff, like a "
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.
Eh?
Rocket Surgeons are the new Slashdot memes, like welcomming overlords, and Beowulf clusters.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
>The problem is that the article isn't discrediting his theory, it's discrediting Yau. Which theory? Yao and his students say that they did not understand Perelman's proof of Poincaré's conjecture and filled in the gaps. Sounds like wishful thinking to me - not the proof. >I don't know much about the people in question, and even less about the math, but it's pretty damn obvious that the article was slanted against Yau for whatever reason. Not that fast. Is John Morgan, who is the head of the mathematics department at Columbia University, slanted against Yao? The article talks about two projects sponsored by the Clay Institute that traced and confirmed validity of Perelman's proof. Dr. Morgan had lead one of them, Gang Tian lead the second. And there were others that reached the same conclusion. He pretty much summed it up when he said: "Perelman already did it and what he did was complete and correct. I don't see that they did anything different". My Chinese coworker read in Chineese publication where Yao is criticized in China for unethical behavior in this ordeal. May be when Yao wins the suite and takes over math both in mainland China, Taiwan and here then he'll twist opinions of us, little people, as much as he wants, he may even call himself Chairman Yao and we'll understand. But on the way he'll have to prove the validity of his math in the court of law because he could not do that in the world of math. Funny it did not occur to him that nobody did that before (since Poincare and earlier). May be ACLU will take on his case and reinstate his proof by theory of reversed discrimination. So much for slanted.
(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