In the continued public discussion of the treatment of Yau’s reputation by the New Yorker article (by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber), to which I earlier referred (see here, and see the post about Yau’s response here), there has been a recent significant development. I don’t mean the press conference of last week, held by Yau’s entourage (…did anyone see that? I could not log on… there is archived video avaialble here. I still can’t view it…reports are welcome).
No, I’m talking about the public letter attributed to Richard Hamilton, the mathematician at Columbia University who is another major player in the story of proving the Poincare conjecture. He does a great job of supporting Yau, and setting the record straight about his numerous contributions to the field in general, and to the proof of the Poincare conjecture in particular. You can see the whole letter here.
It starts:
I am very disturbed by the unfair manner in which Yau Shing-Tung has been portrayed in the New Yorker article.
and there are detailed descriptions of Yau’s early recognition of the importance of Hamilton’s Ricci flow technique, ending in:
Without Yau’s guidance and support at this early stage, there would have been no Ricci Flow program for Perelman to finish.
He then goes on to describe Yau’s contributions to the field through his encouragement and support of several young researchers in the Ricci flow program, and other key work that he and Yau did in the area, in addition to other key contributions of Yau and Li.
He closes with a paragraph that begins:
You has built and assembly of talen, not an empire of power, people attracted by his energy, his brilliant ideas, and his unflagging support for firrst rate mathematics, people whom Yau has brought together to work on the hardest problems.
He ends with
He never to my knowledge proposed any percentages of credit, nor that Perelman should share crefit for the Poincare conjecture with anyone but me […] Far from stealing credit for Perelman’s accomplishment, he has praised Perelman;s work and joined me in supporting him for the Fields Medal. And indeed no one is more responsible that Yau for creating the program on Ricci Flow which Perelman used to win this prize.
And there you have it.
-cvj
(Thanks, Say Lee!)
I also like the crab-bucket analogy, but only when it is applicable. After all the hooorah, it appears that Cao/Zhu/Yau need only look in the mirror to see how they landed at pot’s bottom. This side-by-side comparison is one of the most shameful and blatant acts of plagiarism.
http://www.cds.caltech.edu/%7Enair/pdfs/CaoZhu_plagiarism.pdf
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But not so over at the New Yorker’s online forum where a die-hard is fighting a lone battle to defend Nasar/Gruber’s article. One beneficial thing that emerges there, though, is more and more materials are being cited to support Dr. Yau:
1. In the ICM Daily News dated Aug 24, 2006 (http://www.icm2006.org/dailynews/dailynews24.pdf#search=%22Rich%20Hamilton%20ICM%20daily%20news%22)
The Poincaré Conjecture is finally proven, says Hamilton. In another quote: According to Hamilton, the controversy surrounding the proof of Poincaré’s Conjecture was caused by the press.
The timing of Nasar/Gruber’s article a few days later is indeed uncanny.
2. At http://qjwb.zjol.com.cn/html/2006-08/24/content_1163764.htm, which is a report on the proceedings at the 2006 ICM in Chinese, the English translation reads:
At the 2006 ICM held at Madrid, world famous mathematician, US National Academy of Science member Hamilton said: “Yau and I developed a program —using Ricci flow to solve this problem (the Poincare conjecture). †“Based on several manus posted on the internet, Russian mathematician Perelman claimed that he has completed this program. A complete exposition was recently given by Cao and Zhu.â€
Is that a few attribution of credit, if indeed that’s what some are after?
3. From the online Forum at the New Yorker website, a post says
I like to quote Prof. Stroock’s words:
“What does distinguish Perelman, Yau, and their ilk is that they have accomplished something that will endure and will leave a legacy that, once we have had time to assimilate it, will give our descendants something to contemplate besides their own navels. Of course the rest of us are jealous of their immortality, but our jealousy does not excuse our succumbing to the crab-bucket syndrome.”
I must admit that I had to google the last term in order to understand what Prof. Stroock was trying to say. Well said.
Hamilton is a great mathematician indeed!
He lets mathematics do the talking. Sitting here reading his letter, I can feel the battlefield suddenly becoming awfully quiet. He totally weeds the non-math inclined hotheads out of the discussion. After reading Hamilton’s letter, I start to wonder why people should not credit Yau and his students for the proof of the Poincare conjecture.
You know, I love that almost as much as I love to hear presidents mispronounce “nuclear”. Going to upgrade my flash plugin immediately!! 😉
-cvj
There was nothing in the broadcast (I saw it live) that wasn’t in the letter & homepage of his website (unless you like to hear lawyers mispronounce science terms).
Nice play on the name of the heading.
I was surprised that you could not view the archived video, which I had no problem doing so as per the instructions.
Dr. Yau’s diction may sound jarring to an American ear, but it’s always good to put a face and voice to a name to evoke empathy unlike some of the downright negative posts in the online forum of the New Yorker that hide behind anonymity.