Nasar and Gruber on Perelman
(Boosted from a comment by Cynthia, who gives a brief account of the major contents.)
Manifold Destiny, Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber's New Yorker article on Grigory Perelman, is now on line, and it's a heck of a good read(not to be confused with the cooking-on-your-cars-engine book of the same name. Nasar, you may recall, wrote "A Beautiful Mind," which became the impressive Russell Crowe movie.
The tale they tell is one of math personalities, and Perelman nicely fills center stage in the role of hero-ingenue, but some other characters play major roles too.
I found the author's attempts to seduce Perelman into to agreeing to an interview with carefully chosen gifts pretty amusing, especially since when they finally gave up and went to his door they found he hadn't bothered to check his mail, and consequently hadn't noticed their efforts.
Harvard's Fields Medal winning mathematician Shing-Tung Yau is first on stage and makes quite a convincing villain. Yau, a masterful technician, had achieved fame largely by proving a conjecture of Calabi, providing the highly important Calabi-Yau Manifolds for string theory.
Richard Hamilton is a more ambiguous figure. His idea of Ricci flow proved to be the crucial element for proving the Poincare Conjecture - the real star of this show. Hamilton, though, was something of a playboy, and couldn't seem to concentrate on the problem. Perelman knew a key piece that Hamilton was missing, and tried to alert Hamilton and offered to collaborate, but Hamilton ignored him.
Yau had encouraged Hamilton to work on the Poincare, but they were scooped when Perelman published his proof on the internet. Perelman's proof was brief - key ideas were merely sketched out. Yau and his students worked to fill in the gaps, producing hundreds of pages, and claiming credit for the proof. Most experts who have looked closely at the proof don't think Yau and company contributed any essential ideas that Perelman hadn't already presented.
The unseemly sight of this famous mathematician, his own great work many years behind him, trying to steal the credit (as Perelman saw it) for his ideas may have been a key factor in driving Perelman out of mathematics.
It's not an uncommon circumstance, I guess, for someone who has achieved greatly in his youth to become bitter and petty in his decline. So it seems to have been the case with Yau.
One problem for those like Perelman who crack a famous problem is that by doing so they put a lot of lesser workers out of a job. By solving the problem, they destroy a whole minor industry devoted to work on it.
Manifold Destiny, Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber's New Yorker article on Grigory Perelman, is now on line, and it's a heck of a good read(not to be confused with the cooking-on-your-cars-engine book of the same name. Nasar, you may recall, wrote "A Beautiful Mind," which became the impressive Russell Crowe movie.
The tale they tell is one of math personalities, and Perelman nicely fills center stage in the role of hero-ingenue, but some other characters play major roles too.
I found the author's attempts to seduce Perelman into to agreeing to an interview with carefully chosen gifts pretty amusing, especially since when they finally gave up and went to his door they found he hadn't bothered to check his mail, and consequently hadn't noticed their efforts.
Harvard's Fields Medal winning mathematician Shing-Tung Yau is first on stage and makes quite a convincing villain. Yau, a masterful technician, had achieved fame largely by proving a conjecture of Calabi, providing the highly important Calabi-Yau Manifolds for string theory.
Richard Hamilton is a more ambiguous figure. His idea of Ricci flow proved to be the crucial element for proving the Poincare Conjecture - the real star of this show. Hamilton, though, was something of a playboy, and couldn't seem to concentrate on the problem. Perelman knew a key piece that Hamilton was missing, and tried to alert Hamilton and offered to collaborate, but Hamilton ignored him.
Yau had encouraged Hamilton to work on the Poincare, but they were scooped when Perelman published his proof on the internet. Perelman's proof was brief - key ideas were merely sketched out. Yau and his students worked to fill in the gaps, producing hundreds of pages, and claiming credit for the proof. Most experts who have looked closely at the proof don't think Yau and company contributed any essential ideas that Perelman hadn't already presented.
The unseemly sight of this famous mathematician, his own great work many years behind him, trying to steal the credit (as Perelman saw it) for his ideas may have been a key factor in driving Perelman out of mathematics.
It's not an uncommon circumstance, I guess, for someone who has achieved greatly in his youth to become bitter and petty in his decline. So it seems to have been the case with Yau.
One problem for those like Perelman who crack a famous problem is that by doing so they put a lot of lesser workers out of a job. By solving the problem, they destroy a whole minor industry devoted to work on it.
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