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Why did Grigori Perelman refuse the Fields Medal?

A Chinese math professor who is a fields medalist and at Harvard tried to steal away credit from Mr Perelman. He played dirty politics and promoted papers of his Chinese students. Since he was a fields medalist and at Harvard, he had too much clout. It’s a miracle that Mr Perelman even got the credit eventually else we would have never know about this amazing mathematician.

No wonder Mr Perelman felt system is a zoo and grew a hatred towards it. I am not sure if that Chinese professor is still at Harvard and if he is still respected. Apparently, he even tried to reach out to media to do damage control. It’s a shame though!!

I am surprised that Russia hasn’t made him a national hero.

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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

)

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.

Academia라는 곳은 분야를 막론하고 크고 작게 저런게 존재합니다. 밖에서는 열심히 중요한 연구하는 것 같지만, 더러운 politics와 정쟁이 있고, 페디그리와 줄서기가 엄연히 존재합니다. 배경과 커넥션없이 merit만으로는 연구자로 부각되기 힘들 때가 많습니다. 연구와 politics를 잘 해야 성공합니다.

링크된 뉴욕커에 기사 읽고 읽는데 영화같은 스토리라 재밌네요. 해밀턴이라는 사람도 재밌고. 수학적 스토리 썸머리도 꽤 상세하네요. 난 해밀턴이란 이름이 왜 이렇게 많어…

근데 결국 서로가 서로에게 배우는 과정속에서 문제가 플리는 거네요.
어느 한쪽이 일방적으로 훔쳤다고 하기엔….다만 메인 라스트 펀치라인은 페렐멘에게서 나온듯하고.
Ricci-flow equation … 개념 자체가 대단한 듯…이해하기도 엄청 어려울듯

페렐멘의 필드 메달 선정도 아마 정치적 요소가 들어있을수도 있겠고….다만 대부분은 돈과 명예를 그냥 덥석 받아 무는데 페렐멘은 거기에 대해 좀 초연하군요. 사회주의에서 자란 영향일수도.

Some of Perelman’s friends noticed that he was becoming more and more ascetic. Visitors from St. Petersburg who stayed in his apartment were struck by how sparsely furnished it was. Others worried that he seemed to want to reduce life to a set of rigid axioms. When a member of a hiring committee at Stanford asked him for a C.V. to include with requests for letters of recommendation, Perelman balked. “If they know my work, they don’t need my C.V.,” he said. “If they need my C.V., they don’t know my work.”

Ultimately, he received several job offers. But he declined them all, and in the summer of 1995 returned to St. Petersburg, to his old job at the Steklov Institute, where he was paid less than a hundred dollars a month.

Yakov Eliashberg, a mathematician at Stanford who knew Perelman at Berkeley, thinks that Perelman returned to Russia in order to work on the Poincaré.

수도승 같은 사람인듯. 수학문제 에만 전념하는. 하긴 미국은 너무 디스트랙션이 많지. 해밀턴도 그래서 능력에 비해 논문수는 형편없겠고. 자본주의 성향따라 즐겨야 하니까…사람은 어차피 성향따라 가는듯.

근데 저 중국교수 이름은 이름자체가 신동이군. 여 신동?

페렐멘,
해밀턴
여신동 – 정치쪽에 특화된 성향

극과 극의 성향을 가진 세사람. 마치 색의 삼원색을 보는거 같아.

“I didn’t want to discuss my work with someone I didn’t trust.” Andrew Wiles had also kept the fact that he was working on Fermat’s last theorem a secret

흠….놀랍군. 다들 비밀스럽게 연구한다니…아이디어 도둑맞을까봐…..

Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman’s logic: “To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.”

사회주의의 유물들이나 아직도 이런생각 하지….자본주의 속에 자라면 이런 생각 이해 못한다.