Shing-Tung Yau: Good or Whack?
By
Kwesta Junipo (Tue Sep 26, 2006 at 07:34:03 AM EST)
politics (
all tags)
As Grigori Perelman was refusing his Fields medal for proving Thurston's geometrization conjecture, the New Yorker released the article "
Manifold Destiny". It provides an intriguing perspective into the very human foibles of mathematicians. However, it casts
Shing-Tung Yau in the role of a baddie more evil than Dr. Evil himself.
Shing-Tung Yau is most famous for proving Calabi's conjecture about the existence of Ricci-flat metrics on spaces with holonomy contained in SU(n) and zero first Chern class. He also proved the positive energy theorem in general relativity (it is interesting to note that Witten gave a simpler and more physical proof using spin structures soon afterwards), and the Severi conjecture (informally, the complex projective version of Poincare). He is the 'Y' in the SYZ conjecture, one formulation of "mirror symmetry", and has done seminal work in understanding eigenvalues of Laplacian operators, and generally applying difficult analytic methods to concrete geometrical problems. Morally, therefore, he very much set the stage for Donaldson, and is undoubtedly amongst the very cleverest geometers ever.
However, the article goes to considerable effort to delve into his less savoury characteristics. Despite the fact he has done incredible mathematics (and physics) himself, it is alleged that he has a nasty habit of trying to take credit from others (most famously Perelman, but also Givental). This occurs by saying their proofs are incomplete, whereas in reality they are just terse. He has also made some very nasty and very public allegations about his former doctoral student Gang Tian - including plagiarism, and the fact that he is paid by Peking University just to be a big name superstar.
He is now hired a PR firm, built a vanity page, issued a webcast and is threatening to sue the New Yorker. All this makes for interesting gossip at tea-times of mathematics departments around the world, but is perhaps damages the genial image of the subject and distracts from the beauty of the mathematics itself.
So, HuSi, my question is this. Shing-Tung Yau: good or whack?
