Regret the Error

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.

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