Clarifications from Dan Stroock at MIT, Michael Anderson at Stony Brook, and Joe Kohn at Princeton regarding Ms. Nasar's New Yorker article
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Note: These statements, apparently distributed by people connected to Professor Shing-Tung Yau, were first made available on a Chinese blog. There has no dispute about theire authenticity as far as I know.
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.
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State University of New York at Stony Brook professor Michael Anderson's email to Yau:
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
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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 first 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 Yorker before publication; this was partly because I was travelling in Europe at the time this happened, and there was a rush to publish; the publication date is the same as the announcement date of the Fields Medals I think. I was not sent an advance copy of the article for checking. I spoke with Sylvia on the phone this morning, to no avail. I've also had some email correspondence with Yau on the matter over the last day. I apologized to him and expressed my anger and frustration about what was done, confirming to him the quote attributed to me is false and baseless. The email to Yau is now already posted on a Chinese blog site!）.
I've learned my lesson on dealing with the media the hard and sour way and am still considering what path to pursue to try to rectify the situation, to the extent still possible.
Sincerely,
Mike
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Princeton Professor Joe Kohn's email to Yau:
Dear Yau,
I learned from Andreea that you were very hurt by my remarks quoted in the New Yorker. I did not mean to hurt you. You are universally recognizd as one of the foremost mathematicians of our times, which explains my first remark. I know how deeply you care about Chinese mathematics and therefore I assume that you would like to be as effective as possible in your leadership of the Chinese mathematical community - and this explains my second remark.
Best regards,
Joe
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Updated: For completeness, I also include a letter from Professor Joel Smoller at Michigan to Ms. Nasar. This was again posted in a Chinese BBS, apparently from people connected with Professor Yau.
Dear Ms Nasar:
First let me say that I have been a subscriber to The New Yorker since the 1960's; I love the magazine, and read nearly all the articles every week.
I am also a co-author of Yau's, and since 1991, and we have written 18 joint papers.?Of course, not all of them are major breakthroughs, but at least 2 of them can be so designated: our 2000 paper which appeared in Nuclear Physics B, and our 2006 paper which just appeared in the prestigious journal "Communications in Mathematical Physics". It is extremely rare for mathematicians to get a paper published in a journal devoted to nuclear physics, and our 2006 paper solves a problem dealing with stability of Black-Holes, first elucidated by the Princeton physicist John Wheeler in 1957. These papers ALONE demolish your statement that Yau has had no major results in the last 10 years.?How could you have made such a statement?? Where did you get your information? Didn't you feel a responsibility to check your facts with other mathematicians?? Your behavior reminds me of the Jason Blair scandal at the New York Times.
Shame on You!
Sincerely yours,
Joel
posted by China N. Math | 12:20 AM
6 Comments:
Michael T. Anderson (SUNY at Stony Brook) probably thought that he would not be quoted, that his ideas were going to be presented without a direct link to his name. As I'll explain he seems to have had enough motives to use this opportunity to execute his own personal vendetta against Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard) by instigating reporters to deviate from the main topic of the Poincaré Conjecture and Thurston's Geometrization conjecture to an indictment of Shing-Tung Yau, and his outstanding work.
In my opinion there is little doubt that the article by Gruber and Nasar is grossly biased against Shing-Tung Yau, and to a lesser extent to his collaborators, including Richard S. Hamilton (Columbia). However I don't think that it is correct to blame only the reporters for this. I believe in spite of claims that the quotes are inaccurate, out-of-context, ... , they are probably correct. It is common for reporters to face such claims, and professionals are normally prepared for possible denials. In fact, we might find out that everything said in this case is recorded on tape.
If we are willing to assume that the quotes are correct, then the question remains: why Nasar and Gruber came up with an article so denigrating of Yau, Hamilton, and/or Chinese mathematics? Most likely they were led into this direction by the people they interviewed.. This does not completely clear them, since they did fail miserably in investigating the possible reasons those interviewed had for badmouthing Shing-Tung Yau and his collaborators.
I'll present just one single example to make my point. To some in the field it has been known that for many years Mike Anderson had also been behind proving Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture, and hence Poincaré's Conjecture. He wrote several extremely long papers and claimed to have proved the conjecture. People were a little suspicious about Anderson's work mainly because it did not involve any new ideas, and because it was so long and almost repetitive. To honor what appeared to be a tremendous achievement by Michael T. Anderson, Shing-Tung Yau, in a very generous and friendly gesture promised to dedicate at least one issueof the Journal of Differential Geometry [JDG] in its entirety exclusively to Anderson's work. Yau is the Editor-in-Chief of this prestigious publication. In contrast with Perelman's choice, Anderson did not post his articles at arxiv.org, or made them very widely available. After the announcements and celebrations the review process started in secrecy, Anderson was probably afraid somebody might fix his gaps and find and fix errors, forcing him to share the honor. However after a few months problems appeared with Anderson's work. Whether they were serious or not is not for me to say. But Yau reluctantly decided that Anderson's work was not up to the high standards of the JDG, and explicitly told him to look for another place to publish his work. Assuming he could fix it.
Mike Anderson sincerely believed he had solved the problem of the century. He even had a celebration at the end of his sequence of summer lectures at Stony Brook, with food and champagne. Peter Zograf (Steklov Mathematical Institute, Saint Petersburg), Dennis Parnell Sullivan (CUNY), and other well known mathematicians were present. Some where privately a little skeptic, but they honored Anderson anyway. After having received all this recognition, and in spite of the existence of objections by the referee, it was probably very hard for Anderson to swallow Yau's refusal to allow his paper to appear in the Journal of Differential Geometry, probably the most prestigious publication for geometers. Anderson appealed Yau's decision. He even tried to get other mathematicians to intercede. But Yau did not see any reasons to change his opinion. At that moment Anderson might have felt that Yau was acting "as a king" by denying him the honor he felt he deserved, that he abusing his power, that he was having oversight where he should not. This goes a long way to explain why Anderson might have felt that he could now present Shing-Tung as a clown, as he effectively did when he reportedly said:
"Yau wants to be the king of geometry"
Yau "believes that everything should issue from him".
Yau believes "that he should have oversight" over everything.
In view of this and other facts, it is hard to imagine that Nasar and Gruber could have been presented by Anderson with a fair evaluation of the role of Shing-Tung Yau and Richard Hamilton in Perelman's work. However these reporters ought to have done more research and at the very least their article ought to have contained a minimal mention that Anderson had been competing for the same honor. Or even better, that Shing-Tung Yau had been perhaps the first prominent mathematician to suggest by his rejection from the JDF that there might be serious problems Anderson's work, effectively liquidating his dreams of claiming the honor of having proved Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture and Poincare's Conjecture.
To quote an anonymous author over there on the Fruitcake Field:
Okay, as a journalist, I feel I have to chime in.
I think Nasar and Gruber produced a beautifully written and titillating article, and I confess I very much enjoyed reading it. But the part of me that enjoyed it is not a part of me I'm proud of -- the article is gossip, pure and simple.
While Anderson and the others sound a bit naive in their dealings with a journalist, I think it's a shame that Sylvia Nasar managed to elicit and publish several quotes from them that they all felt were not representative or fair, given that there was no higher purpose involved. Journalists are supposed to play hardball when dealing with sources at big companies or in the goverment who are skilled at manipulating the media and have something to hide. In those situations, the press performs a service by providing a check on sleazy activities by powerful people.
But that was not the situation here. Yau is powerful, and, it seems, rather sleazy, but he had not caused any damage. There is no controversy about who proved Poincare. It's clear -- even to non-topologists -- that the credit goes to Perelman. Yau's students were one of three groups who came up with "complete proofs." This fact alone indicates that no additional huge leaps were required.
For this reason, I feel that the Nasar-Gruber article violated journalism ethics. They achieved nothing by airing this dispute to the public, except to create more ugliness.
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Hi
Very nice and intrestingss story.
Grigory is not just stopping with his contribution to mathematics. By rejecting this "award," he is making a tremendous contribution to ethics in mathematics, science and other research oriented disciplines. He *is* doing something about it by bringing the cheating, stealing and plagiarism of other people's original ideas into the glare of the public light. The best way for progress is by shaming the research community. The fruits of this shame will be worth more than a million dollars and it will be a benchmark and a warning for generations to come.
There is no surprise in a Chinese mathematician defending the actions of another Chinese mathematician.
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