The Spanish Inquisition II

According to the daily news release on August 26 from the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2006 in Madrid:

“In 2003, Perelman solved the Poincare Conjecture.”: John Morgan. Shortly after the start of his talk, John Morgan [of Columbia] paused for the sincere and unanimous applause that filled the hall.

When “sincere and unanimous applause” filled the hall at the beginning of a mathematical talk, when mathematicians clapped their hands so hard and stood up for so long, something extraordinary must have happened. Indeed. In the opening ceremony attended by the King of Spain on August 22, Sir John Ball, the President of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), said:

Mathematics is a profession of high standards and integrity. We freely discuss our work with others without fear of it being stolen, and research is communicated openly prior to formal publication. Editorial procedures are fair and proper, and work gains its reputation through merit and not by how it is promoted. These are the norms operated by the vast majority of mathematicians. The exceptions are rare, and they are noticed.

The implication was that a grand larceny had occurred. Everyone knew what Sir John Ball was referring to. Several days before Sir John Ball’s speech, buzzes ran wide within the mathematical community that a piece on the Poincaré conjecture by Ms. Sylvia Nasar (of the fame of A Beautiful Mind) would appear on the August 28 issue of the New Yorker. Within hours of Sir John Ball’s speech, the article was posted on the New Yorker’s website. It has since become arguably the most widely read and blogged article on mathematicians.

In her article with Mr. David Gruber, Manifold Destiny---A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it, Ms. Nasar wrote:

Yau, a stocky man of fifty-seven, stood at a lectern in shirtsleeves and black-rimmed glasses and, with his hands in his pockets, described how two of his students, Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao, had completed a proof of the Poincaré conjecture a few weeks earlier. “I’m very positive about Zhu and Cao’s work,” Yau said. “Chinese mathematicians should have every reason to be proud of such a big success in completely solving the puzzle.” He said that Zhu and Cao were indebted to his longtime American collaborator Richard Hamilton, who deserved most of the credit for solving the Poincaré. He also mentioned Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician who, he acknowledged, had made an important contribution. Nevertheless, Yau said, “in Perelman’s work, spectacular as it is, many key ideas of the proofs are sketched or outlined, and complete details are often missing.” He added, “We would like to get Perelman to make comments. But Perelman resides in St. Petersburg and refuses to communicate with other people.”
……
On April 13th of this year, the thirty-one mathematicians on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Mathematics received a brief e-mail from Yau and the journal’s co-editor informing them that they had three days to comment on a paper by Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao titled “The Hamilton-Perelman Theory of Ricci Flow: The Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures,” which Yau planned to publish in the journal. The e-mail did not include a copy of the paper, reports from referees, or an abstract. At least one board member asked to see the paper but was told that it was not available. On April 16th, Cao received a message from Yau telling him that the paper had been accepted by the A.J.M., and an abstract was posted on the journal’s Web site.
……
By the end of the following week, the title of Zhu and Cao’s paper on the A.J.M.’s Web site had changed, to “A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures: Application of the Hamilton-Perelman Theory of the Ricci Flow.” The abstract had also been revised. A new sentence explained, “This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci flow.”

Zhu and Cao’s paper was more than three hundred pages long and filled the A.J.M.’s entire June issue. The bulk of the paper is devoted to reconstructing many of Hamilton’s Ricci-flow results—including results that Perelman had made use of in his proof—and much of Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré. In their introduction, Zhu and Cao credit Perelman with having “brought in fresh new ideas to figure out important steps to overcome the main obstacles that remained in the program of Hamilton.” However, they write, they were obliged to “substitute several key arguments of Perelman by new approaches based on our study, because we were unable to comprehend these original arguments of Perelman which are essential to the completion of the geometrization program.” 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.”

By early June, Yau had begun to promote the proof publicly. On June 3rd, at his mathematics institute in Beijing, he held a press conference. The acting director of the mathematics institute, attempting to explain the relative contributions of the different mathematicians who had worked on the Poincaré, said, “Hamilton contributed over fifty per cent; the Russian, Perelman, about twenty-five per cent; and the Chinese, Yau, Zhu, and Cao et al., about thirty per cent.” (Evidently, simple addition can sometimes trip up even a mathematician.) Yau added, “Given the significance of the Poincaré, that Chinese mathematicians played a thirty-per-cent role is by no means easy. It is a very important contribution.”

The second page of the New Yorker article consists of a full-page cartoon that features Yau grabbing Perelman’s Fields Medal. Throughout the article Yau was depicted as the new insidious Fu Manchu set to build an empire to "threaten the integrity of our field". (Emphasis is mine.) Of the seven mathematicians of Chinese heritage named in the article, six of them were alleged, one way or another, to involve in plagiary and/or claiming undeserved credits. (See Ms. Nasar Hunts Chinese Witches for detail.)


[It is not that Ms. Nasar is always against empire building. In an article in the USA Today that warns that the U.S. could fall behind in the global “brain race” as China and India rise, Ms. Nasar was quoted:

And productivity growth determines who is the leader and who is a follower in the global economy. A 1% shortfall in British productivity from 1880 to 1990 transformed "the once proud empire into a second-rate economy in little more than a lifetime," in the words of economics writer Sylvia Nasar.

Ms. Nasar certainly sounds nostalgic; but few Chinese people would. It was that “proud empire” who after wining the Opium War in the 1840’s, forced the Chinese people to smoke opium and grabbed a piece of Chinese land along the way. Thus began the Century of Humiliation in the Chinese history. Coincidentally, that piece of land, Hong Kong, was the place where Dr. Yau grew up.]

It is remarkable how much these paragraphs of Sir John Ball’s and Ms. Nasar’s correlate to each other. (In an open letter released on September 18, Mr. Cooper, Yau’s lawyer, wrote: “I note that your article fails to disclose Ms. Nasar’s relationship with Mr. Griffiths”. Professor Phillip Griffiths of IAS is the secretary of the IMU.)

There is an allegation that the IMU requested local organizers to distribute photocopies of the New Yorker article at the ICM and/or satellite conferences. This allegation, if proven, would represent a gross misuse of the IMU offices. It also violates people’s sense of fairness: No rebuttal from Yau and others who were accused of unethical conducts was seen accompanying the New Yorker article. For the first time in the history, the ICM was used as a bully pulpit for personal vendettas against its members based on an article that was discredited by several mathematicians quoted therein.

In our gadarene rush to stone the demon, we have lost our sense and sensibility. When does the Chinese media decide who contribute what in mathematics? When does the New Yorker become a place to resolve professional and academic grievance? When does a mathematical conference become a place to trade innuendoes and tabloids?

For many, the ICM 2006 would be remembered as the event where the Poincaré conjecture was finally declared solved. For some, it would be remembered as the new Spanish Inquisition led by Ms. Nasar---an author who has not been shy from promoting anti-Chinese bigotry---to witch hunt Professor Yau and other mathematicians of Chinese heritage.

“Can we all get along?” Rodney King once cried out.

This is the King Millennium Problem waiting for all of us to answer.