Statements regarding Nasar's New Yorker article on Givental's work

Note: These are statements, apparently from people connected to Professor Shing-Tung Yau, first made available on a Chinese Blog. Translation from Chinese is mine.

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On the Candelas Mirror symmetry formula and the lies in the New Yorker article

Givental's paper obviously has gaps. Famous Russian mathematician Manin, in his paper “Frobenius manifolds, quantum cohomology and moduli spaces（Chapt I,II, III)”, pp. 15, said：“Some work remains to be done in order to complete his (Givental's) arguments.”

Gang Tian and Jun Li, in their article “A brief tour of GW invariants" published in "Survey in differential geometry" 1998, wrote clearly: " after works of many, including Candelas et al, Kontsevich, Givental, this conjecture was proved rigorously by Lia-Liu-Yau in [LLY]"

A prominent mathematician in this field wrote：“Givental’s paper is obscure, misleading, and generally criminally written. It certainly does not meet the usual standards of proof. I essentially had to prove all of his Propositions for myself to believe them since his proofs are ridiculous.”

A. Todorov, in his article “Quantum Background Independence and Witten Geometric Quantization of the Moduli of CY Threefolds”, wrote on page 4: “Recently B. Lian, K. Liu and Yau gave a rigorous mathematical proof of the Candelas formula”.

A. Gathmann wrote on Lian-Liu-Yau in the Math Review：“He [Givental] derived the original hypergeometric series for the n_d conjectured by Candelas et al; however, his proof was hard to understand and at some points incomplete. The current paper of Lian, Liu, and Yau now gives the first complete rigorous proof of the physicists’ formula for the numbers n_d.”

Brian Greene's popular “Elegant Universe” also mentioned that it was Lian-Liu-Yau who first gave a complete proof of the Candelas formula。