China and Math

The Spanish Inquisition II

2006-09-29T01:35:00.001-04:00

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.

Ms. Nasar Hunts Chinese Witches

2006-09-22T14:47:00.000-04:00

(1) In Ms. Nasar’s article with Mr. Gruber, she labeled both Professors Shing-Tung Yau and Shiing-Shen Chern as “the Chinese mathematician”. In fact, both are U.S. citizens born in China. It is important to note that only mathematicians of Chinese heritage were labeled this way in the article. This labeling is in contrary to the common practice of using the term “Chinese American mathematician” in the mainstream news media in both the U.S. and China. (In Chinese media, Yau and Chern are called “mei ji hua ren”-U.S. citizen of Chinese heritage.) Ms. Nasar went to length to describe the contributions of Yau and Chern to the scientific development in China but neglected to mention that both were awarded this nation’s highest scientific honor, the National Medal of Science. The subliminal message is that both Yau and Chern work only to advance the Chinese interest. Such bigotry is nothing new in this country: Jewish people have been subject to such stereotype for a long time.

(2) While there were extensive discussions on original ideas in mathematics in this 14-page long article, not a single sentence, as far as I know, associated mathematicians of Chinese heritage to originality. Even the originality of Yau’s Fields Medal work was downplayed. This article promotes the false and harmful stereotypes that mathematicians of Chinese heritage are “technical” but not “original”. (See an open letter to Ms. Nasar for more detail on this point.)

(3) Seven mathematicians of Chinese heritage were named in the article: Yau, Chern, Gang Tian, Huai-Dong Cao, Xi-Ping Zhu, Kefeng Liu, Bong H. Lian (implicitly, as the coauthor of Liu and Yau). While there was only minimal coverage on Chern, all six others were alleged, one way or another, to involve in plagiary and/or claiming undeserved credits. More importantly, in the article, no other mathematicians but only those of Chinese heritage were alleged to involve in such unethical practices. This is biased, prejudiced, and, in fact, racist. To illustrate this point, substitute all Chinese names by Jewish names, China by Israel, and Chinese by Jewish. This article would then have been easily recognized as anti-Semitic.

(4) This is not the first time Ms. Nasar spews anti-Chinese venom. In her article Best Business Book 2003: Globalization, she promoted the book World on Fire by Amy Chua. Here is what Ms. Nasar wrote:

Chua compares the wealthy Chinese, like her aunt, who dominate the markets of many Asian countries to the successful Jews of Europe in the 1920s. “In the Philippines, millions of Filipinos work for Chinese; almost no
Chinese work for Filipinos. The Chinese dominate industry and society at every level…. When foreign investors do business in the Philippines they deal almost exclusively with Chinese.” When she was 8 years old, she recalls,
she stumbled into the servant quarters in her aunt’s villa: “My family’s houseboys, gardeners, and chauffeurs … were sleeping on mats on a dirt floor. The place smelled of sweat and urine. I was horrified.”

This is bigotry, pure and simple. It is now well established that Ms. Nasar distorted other people’s statements to fit her own agenda. (“As it appears in her article, she has purposefully distorted my statement and made it unforgivably misleading.” ---Dan Stroock of MIT.) There were also controversies regarding Ms. Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind about the anti-Semitic statements that she attributed to Mr. John Nash. (See, for example, An Anti-Semitic Mind? by Tom Tugent at The Jewish Journal.)

田刚教授应辞去北京国际数学研究中心主任职务

2006-09-16T09:35:00.000-04:00

不可否认，进年来，丘成桐教授与田刚教授及北大的争议，已经给海内外华人数学界甚至整个科技教育领域带来冲击。这件事情如何发展，目前尚难预测。作为一个身在北美，关心中国发展的数学工作者，我认为，田刚教授应辞去北京国际数学研究中心主任的职务。

1。中国学术界一个很大的弊病是近亲繁殖。比如说北大数学系的多数教员是本校毕业的，这不利於校际间的交流。田刚教授的硕士导师张恭庆教授曾任北大数学所所长长达十二年，并任中国数学会理事长多年，在中国数学界有着深远影响。与张先生有亲戚关系的文兰教授又是现任中国数学会理事长。假如由田先生来任数学中心主任，会给人以裙带关系，山头主义的不良感觉。

2。在聘请田先生为长江教授及推荐田先生为中科院院士时对其在国内工作时间的要求问题上，北大的做法颇有争议，说法也前后矛盾。田先生一直以来是美国麻省理工或普林斯顿大学的全职教授，一般来说，美国大学的工资是按九个月发的。而田先生又长期得到美国国家科学基金的支持 (该资金一般发暑假两个月的工资)。假如田先生还从北大领取四个月工资的话，此做法，即使没有违背任何法规，在中国数以万计的小孩没钱念书，千千万万的工人下岗低收入，几亿人没医疗保险的背景下，也是值得商酌的。

3。北大党委书记闵维方先生近日在接受记者采访时所提出来的 “筑巢引凤”的理论难以以理服人。跟别的自然学科不一样，数学研究并不需要很多设备。佩雷尔曼解决庞加莱猜想并不是因为他在金屋银巢里工作，而是他的才智与专心致志。更何况，不少在国际上很有声望的学者，如清华的姚期智教授，并非“筑巢引凤”而引进的。闵先生的此种说法，有贬低已经全职回国学者价值的嫌疑。老一辈的科学家，如华罗庚先生，钱学森先生在五十年代新中国一穷二白的环境下毅然举家回国，开创科研中心，他们的精神很令人敬佩。显然，田先生在全职回国工作的问题上犹豫不决，这或许包含有家庭与事业方面的考虑，这是很容易理解的。俗话说，强扭的果不甜，北大为何硬要强人所难呢？

4。哈佛的丘成桐教授和萧荫堂教授都曾对田先生的某些学术上的行为提出过质疑。他们皆为美国科学院院士及中国科学院外籍院士，在国际与国内数学界颇有影响。公平的说，这些质疑尚无公论，但在当今国内学术腐败盛行的背景下任命一位学术品德上有争议的人士为国家级学术中心的主任，很难起表率作用，会带来不良影响。

田先生愿为中国数学发展奉献的精神是难能可贵的。很多的时候，科学家不在领导岗位上，反而能做更大的贡献。北大有着优良的传统，北京国际数学研究中心的成立是中国数学界的一件大事。近年来华人在数学领域上成绩裴然，人才济济。北大何必暗箱操作，何不邀请国际国内知名学者成立一个招聘委员会，公开选拔数学中心主任？

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

2006-08-27T22:21:00.000-04:00

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。

Clarifications from Dan Stroock at MIT, Michael Anderson at Stony Brook, and Joe Kohn at Princeton regarding Ms. Nasar's New Yorker article

2006-08-26T00:20:00.000-04:00

Manifold Destiny: A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it

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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

An open letter to Ms. Sylvia Nasar regarding her article in The New Yorker with David Gruber:

2006-08-26T00:02:00.001-04:00

Manifold Destiny
---A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it.

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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