Re: Fields awardee Shing-Tung Yau lied in Chinese media about Poincare conjecture proof's attribution


Robert Israel wrote:
In article <1149490925.527163.180660@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<yaoziyuan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

First accounts of mathematics-related events in Western news media are
often inaccurate. I don't know if the Chinese media are better at this.
But it seems there is such a paper in Vol. 10 #2 of the Asian Journal of
Mathematics, and its abstract can be found at
<http://www.intlpress.com/AJM/p/2006/10_2/AJM-10-2-165-498-Abstract.php>
Yes, it does claim to provide a complete proof of the Poincaré and the
geometrization conjectures. I didn't find a preprint in arXiv.org, or
on Cao's website.


If Cao and Zhu's claim is correct, and I have no particular reason to
doubt it, I would not be at all surprised if this paper was very
valuable indeed.

The abstract is strange. Part of it said:

"This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of the
Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci flow."


Competent mathematicians do not pat themselves on the back in their own
paper. They let OTHERS judge the work. This one sentence alone in the
abstract
makes me wonder if the authors are playing with a full deck. Authors
do NOT
refer to their own work as a "crowning achievment".

Also, AFAIK, the Perelman result had been more or less accepted as
complete. I had not heard of any gaps. Yet these authors seem to
minimize
Perelman's contribution.

Nor do they give a general indication of the gap (if any) in
Perelman's work.

It seems like a lot of hype.

And Yau would be in a good position to comment
on this. But in some sense Yau's statement is rather strange:

So is the hype.

.

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