I understand that you feel strongly about this, but as I said in comments earlier…let’s stay away from the accusations of lies and theft. I’m not really seeing this leading to a productive direction.

Cheers,

-cvj

http://www.cds.caltech.edu/7Enair/pdfs/CaoZhu_plagiarism.pdf
that resulted in an erratum being published. Probably in any other journal, this would have merited a full retration.

http://www.intlpress.com/AJM/p/2006/10_2/AJM-10-2-Erratum.pdf

Under US law, STY would have to prove some factual inaccuracy in the article. You can’t base a libel or slander case on arguing about whether or not it’s too tendentious to describe a disagreement over relative proportions of credit as a ‘battle’.

The only factual detail STY disputes is whether or not he assigned percentages of credit for the Poincare conjecture in his talk at strings 2006.

He has no case against the New Yorker based on this, however, since You’s asignment of percentages was reported by several sources long before the New Yorker article, including at least one major wire service. It’s hard to believe they’re all lying.

But even if those reports are wrong and Yau didn’t assign percentages, the New Yorker relied in good faith on what it thought were legitimate sources. That does not provide evidence of malice which you would need to prove a defamation case.

If STY really did not assign percentages, it was a major mistake not to dispute the reports that he did which came out at the time. It’s possible, of course, that the reason he didn’t dispute the reports is because they were true.

Either way, all the Strings talks were preserved as recorded audio. If STY really didn’t say what he’s reported to have said, let him produce the audio recording and prove it.

Standard practice is for audio of Strings talks to be posted on the web soon after they occur — days or weeks at the absolute latest. It’s now been months and the talks have not been posted. Yau is chair of the Organizing Committee for Strings 2006.

Clifford, if you think Yau’s case is so strong, you should ask him why the content of the talks — particularly his own — has not been made public.

Looks like this matter will take its own tortuous course along the litigation path. Wonder what’s the stand of the respective employers of the protagonists. Internal investigations?

(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:

Chua compares the wealthy Chinese, like her aunt, who dominate the markets of many Asian countries to the successful Jews of Europe in the 1920s. “In the Philippines, millions of Filipinos work for Chinese; almost no
Chinese work for Filipinos. The Chinese dominate industry and society at every level…. When foreign investors do business in the Philippines they deal almost exclusively with Chinese.” When she was 8 years old, she recalls,
she stumbled into the servant quarters in her aunt’s villa: “My family’s houseboys, gardeners, and chauffeurs … were sleeping on mats on a dirt floor. The place smelled of sweat and urine. I was horrified.”

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.)

As for being unfair, I would plead a distant second to the “rich documentation” of Nasar and Gruber. But then again I’m no professional journalist.

Cheers,

-cvj

http://www.intlpress.com/AJM/p/2006/10_2/AJM-10-2-165-492.pdf

Here is the Abstract.

In this paper, we give a complete proof of the Poincar´e 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.

Isn’t the attribution highly professionally done?

Aren’t these among the desirable qualities we wish to inculcate in today’s kids? We live in an imperfect world and conflicts do arise when people are at odds with each other. We would not want to harm others, either by word or by deed, but we do have to know how to protect our good name.

-cvj

I think that through all of this fog, a student will certainly appreciate another useful fact that is not known widely about mathematics, which is that it is an exciting field full of personalities… very much alive. This is a good thing to see. Pettiness, if indeed relevant here, appears in any field where there are human beings working. It is not special to Mathematics.

-cvj

Usually Asian people are loathe to seeking redress through legal means. But in this instance suing is perhaps the last recourse available to Yau to redeem his reputation.

Oh piffle! Don’t be so po-faced… anyone would think you were at Cambridge or something! Oh, wait…..

Touché.