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Was it really Grigori Perelman that resolved the Poincaré conjecture?
The plagiarism in this case goes the other way, it’s the Harvard mathematicians attempting to steal Perelman’s work and claim it for themselves. It was the subject of an article in the New Yorker ( http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/28/060828fa_fact2
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Two Harvard mathematicians working under Yau, Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao, claimed to have closed the (nonexistent) gaps in what they characterized as the sketch provided by Perelman. This process of “completing” proofs by lesser known figures was just a codified and accepted form of academic theft, which was tolerated in the 1970s and 1980s, because nobody had a good enough access to all the literature to find the obscure papers that were being cribbed.
This type of thing serves a minor purpose, in that it usually extends the results incrementally, and advertizes them, and rewrites them in more accessible language, and allows people to see that the work is correct by linking it to other work. But in the dark ages of the 1970s and 1980s, simply by doing this pedestrian work requiring no major ingenuity or years of isolated brain-breaking labor, these folks would have gotten the majority of the credit for solving the Poincare problem, while Perelman would have languished in obscurity.
But today, we have an internet, and Perelman’s work was online, and written exceptionally clearly. So in a remarkable unprecedented demonstration of the power of the internet, these prominent and powerful Harvard geometers with a ton of clout were basically told by the mathematical community to go shove it. It was the unemployed and isolated Perelman’s result, and they had done nothing signifcantly new.
This was like a dawn in the field of mathematics. It announced that the dark ages are over, that the plagiarism and horrible academic ethics that characterized the 1970s and 1980s are done, finished. Can’t get away with this crap anymore. This unethical bullshit alienated great mathematicians like Grothendieck and Perelman from professional mathematics. It really sucks balls when great famous people do it, it’s not like they need to do this kind of crap.
The same problem occured in physics in the 1970s and 1980s, the Russians were often the victims, but I don’t want to name names. It’s all finished. Can’t get away with it anymore.