An open letter to Ms. Sylvia Nasar regarding her article in The New Yorker with David Gruber:
Manifold Destiny
---A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it.
***************************************************************
Dear Ms. Nasar:
As a mathematician born in China, I am deeply offended by your article with Mr. Gruber in the recent issue of the New Yorker. Your narrative plays to the stereotype that mathematicians of Chinese heritage are "technical" but not "original".
(1) In the first sentence of your article, you identified Professor Yau as "the Chinese mathematician". In fact: Yau is a U. S. citizen. To make my point simple: Don't you agree that it oddly emphasizes your cultural heritage if you are called "the Bavarian journalist and writer"? (I noticed that you were listed as an American journalist and writer born in Bavaria in the Wikipedia.) You wasted no time to connect the dots in the next sentence: Yau was "a thinker of unrivalled technical power".
(2) In your narrative of the works that led to Yau's Fields medal, you misrepresented the facts and downplayed the originality of Yau's contribution. "In 1976, he proved a twenty-year-old conjecture pertaining to a type of manifold that is now crucial to string theory. A French mathematician had formulated a proof of the problem, which is known as Calabi’s conjecture, but Yau’s, because it was more general, was more powerful... 'He was not so much thinking up some original way of looking at a subject but solving extremely hard technical problems that at the time only he could solve, by sheer intellect and force of will,' Phillip Griffiths, a geometer and a former director of the Institute for Advanced Study, said".
(3) Even in your narrative of Chern, there is no mention of any of his original work or idea.
(4) In Yau's seminar, "[e]ach student was assigned a recently published proof and asked to reconstruct it, fixing any errors and filling in gaps". As for the controversy surrounding Givental's work, "[o]ccasionally, the difference between a mathematical gap and a gap in exposition can be hard to discern. On at least one occasion, Yau and his students [Bong H. Lian and Kefeng Liu] have seemed to confuse the two, making claims of originality that other mathematicians believe are unwarranted." You were adamant that Professor Givental's work was complete and correct. A simple search in MathSciNet's review of Givental's paper would have given you a different perspective.
(5) In your narrative of Professor Tian's reaction to Yau's allegations, you again emphasized Tian's Chinese heritage: "I [Tian] have deep roots in Chinese culture. A teacher is a teacher. There is respect. It is very hard for me to think of anything to do.”
(6) "Yau’s entrepreneurial drive extended to collaborations with colleagues and students, and, in addition to conducting his own research, he began organizing seminars. He frequently allied himself with brilliantly inventive mathematicians, including Richard Schoen and William Meeks." Yau has many students and collaborators of Chinese heritage; some of them are now professors in top universities in this country. Of course, none of them are supposed to be "inventive", not even "Yau's most successful student" Tian. I also question the connotation of "entrepreneurial".
(7) It is now clear that you are determined to prove your point. "Mathematicians familiar with Perelman’s proof disputed the idea that Zhu and Cao had contributed significant new approaches to the Poincaré. 'Perelman already did it and what he did was complete and correct,' John Morgan said. 'I don’t see that they did anything different.'" " 'It is not clear to me what new contribution did they [Cao and Zhu] make,' he [Perelman] said. 'Apparently, Zhu did not quite understand the argument and reworked it.'" I argue that the statements of Morgan and Perelman are not necessarily consistent with each other. Morgan said Cao-Zhu did nothing different from Perelman, while Perelman said Cao-Zhu did not understand his argument and had to "reworked" it, thus implying that they did at least something different.
I could have listed a lot more; but I think these are sufficient to illustrate my point. Here is a challenge to you, Ms. Nasar: List the sentences in your long article that associate mathematicians of Chinese heritage with "originality", and likewise list those that separate them from "technicality".
I have enjoyed tremendously reading your beautifully written "A beautiful mind". It was a moving and inspirational story. I am now then truly disappointed and horrified by this article of yours in the New Yorker, a magazine that is supposed to represent the best of intelligentsia. Personal vendettas lead us nowhere. Your article is hugely biased. It is a disservice to the mathematical community as a whole; it irreparably and unnecessarily damages Yau's reputation; it does not help Tian; and most importantly, it promotes the false and harmful stereotypes of mathematicians of certain cultures.
One internet chatter, apparently a mathematician/student of Chinese origin, reported that one of his colleagues placed the cartoon in your article on the office door. The chatter stated that he felt "ashamed" when passing by the colleague's office.
For all the harms that have occurred, I believe, at the minimum, a public apology from you and the New Yorker to all is warranted.
Sincerely yours,
China N. Math
posted by China N. Math | 12:02 AM
4 Comments:
Interesting letter.
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 vendetta against Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard) by instigating reporters to deviate from main topic of the Poincaré Conjecture and Thurston's Geometrization conjecture to an indictment
of Yau, and his 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.
From New Yorker Forum, posted by "mathematicalrespondent":
"The open letter doesn't indicate any actual problem with Nasar's reporting.
Taking the criticisms point-by-point, we see they are all false.
1. The article correctly identifies Yau as a Chinese-born mathematician whose career has been the US and who also has substantial professional interests in China. Most of his students, postdocs, invited visiting professors, and collaborators are Chinese. Yau takes pains to identify himself as a Chinese to the Chinese mathematical and political community and the article made that clear. The article does not question his level of affiliation to the USA. Some of Yau's Harvard colleagues would be correctly identified as (e.g.) "Russian" mathematicians for similar reason, without any implication as to their level of American-ness.
2. Yau's contributions are played up, not down. It is true that he is more on the technical side, and there is nothing less in that than if he were a Grothendieck-style propounder of Big Mathematical Ideas. Many other Fields medalists are more on the problem-solving side than the conceptual or foundational one. Griffiths' quotation confirms that Yau was a spectacular problem-solver.
3. The article doesn't say anything about Chern because it isn't about Chern. It does make clear that Chern was a major mathematical figure and the leading Chinese mathematician of his time. Most of the events described in the article had nothing to do with Chern and occurred after he was dead.
4. The article correctly reports that there was a controversy related to Givental's paper on mirror symmetry, and the later work of Yau's group. The general consensus is indeed that Givental already did everything.
5. Tian, not the New Yorker, emphasized Tian's Chinese heritage. He gave that as the reason for not responding to Yau's accusations (which is bullshit anyway; they fought on Chinese bulletin boards through their students and other third parties, and Tian certainly made his position known using such proxies).
6. "Entrepreneurial" is, literally, a correct description. Yau is involved in business ventures such as the International Press math publishing house. It is also a correct and very good one-word description of the fact (and there is nothing wrong with this fact) that Yau is an ambitious, hard-working empire-builder in the way he has conducted his mathematical career. That's fine, and he is not the only one. What is your problem with this word?
7. I read the article several times and it does not appear to make any associations between Chinese mathematicians in general, and "technical" tendencies. Can you quote any sentences you claim are problematic?
I do agree with one point: the cartoon is outrageous and the New Yorker should apologize for that."
You might as well just kill me now. Teela wasnt that worried aboutminor imperfections, anyway.
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You might as well just kill me now. Teela wasnt that worried aboutminor imperfections, anyway.
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