Dr. Shing-Tung Yau, a famous mathematician who was unfavorably portrayed in a recent New Yorker article about the Poincaré conjecture, is alleging that Pulitzer-prize winner
Sylvia Nasar defamed him. Strangely, however, his press release (below) doesn't mention the co-author of the piece, David Gruber. Dr. Yau's attorney has sent a letter to the magazine on behalf of his client. Dr. Yau "has demanded that The New Yorker and Nasar make
a prominent correction of the errors in the article, and apologize for
an insulting illustration that accompanied it. "
Dr. Yau will be holding a webcast on Wednesday to detail his allegations. We'll be there. In the meantime, read the press release is below.
UPDATE: The Boston Herald has a short article on Dr. Yau's charges. It also has a couple of quotes from New Yorker editor David Remnick:
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said yesterday he had only recently received Cooper’s letter, but the magazine “painstakingly checked the facts” in the Aug. 28 article “as we do with all pieces in The New Yorker.”
“I would have assumed that Professor Yau and his attorney would have waited for a full response to their letter before forwarding it to the press,” Remnick said.
The press release:
Pulitzer-prize winner Sylvia Nasar ("A Beautiful Mind") defamed world renowned Harvard mathematics professor Dr. Shing-Tung Yau, in an article about a noteworthy mathematical proof in The New Yorker magazine entitled "Manifold Destiny" (August 28, 2006), according to a letter written by Dr. Yau's attorney, Howard M. Cooper of Todd & Weld LLP of Boston. In the letter, Dr. Yau has demanded that The New Yorker and Nasar make a prominent correction of the errors in the article, and apologize for an insulting illustration that accompanied it.
"Beyond repairing the damage to my own reputation, we seek to minimize the damage done to the mathematics community itself, which is ludicrously portrayed as contentious rather than cooperative and more competitive than collegial," Dr. Yau said. "Mathematicians from the foremost institutions - from Beijing to Berkeley - have been appalled at the fictionalizing of our profession."
The attorney letter alleges that Ms. Nasar misrepresented her intentions in emails to him in which she claimed an interest in the "reuniting of physics and mathematics" and that she had been impressed with praise of his work from Stephen Hawking. Never during the three months in which she worked on the article, according to the letter, was Dr. Yau made aware of or asked to respond to charges leveled against him in the published article, claiming that Dr. Yau was trying to take credit for the solution of the Poincare Conjecture away from Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman. Contrary to the article, there has never been a 'battle' over credit for the solution, said the letter. Many of the other scholars interviewed by Ms. Nasar report being similarly deceived, according to the letter, with one professor at the University of Michigan comparing her work to that of the notorious fabricator, Jason Blair of The New York Times.
Shing-Tung Yau, a professor at Harvard since 1987, who himself received a Fields Medal in 1982, holds today the nation's highest science award, the National Medal of Science, awarded in 1997 for his "profound contributions to mathematics that have had a great impact on fields as diverse as topology, algebraic geometry, general relativity, and string theory. His work insightfully combines two different mathematical approaches and has resulted in the solution of several longstanding and important problems in mathematics."
The allegations made in the letter will be discussed in detail in a webcast open to all interested parties scheduled for Noon EDT, Wednesday, September 20, 2006. Log in information will be posted on http://www.doctoryau.com/ . The letter sent to The New Yorker is available at his website.
