Saturday, August 26, 2006

New Yorker bashes some mathematicians

Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber try to create an artificial controversy over who solved the Poincare Conjecture in this New Yorker article. The article has some seemingly damaging gossip, but see this message board where a couple of mathematicians claim that they have been misquoted.

One of the main New Yorker claims is that Shing-Tung Yau pushed thru a Chinese paper on Perelman's theorem in an attempt to cheat Perelman out of credit. It seems to me that Yau did Perelman a favor. The Chinese paper credits Perelman, and probably helped Perelman get the Fields Medal. The New Yorker should have stuck to telling the math story.

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