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By mid-July, Perelman had posted the final two installments of his proof on the Internet, and mathematicians had begun the work of formal explication, painstakingly retracing his steps. In the United States, at least two teams of experts had assigned themselves this task: Gang Tian (Yau’s rival) and John Morgan; and a pair of researchers at the University of Michigan. Both projects were supported by the Clay Institute, which planned to publish Tian and Morgan’s work as a book. The book, in addition to providing other mathematicians with a guide to Perelman’s logic, would allow him to be considered for the Clay Institute’s million-dollar prize for solving the Poincaré. (To be eligible, a proof must be published in a peer-reviewed venue and withstand two years of scrutiny by the mathematical community.)
On September 10, 2004, more than a year after Perelman returned to St. Petersburg, he received a long e-mail from Tian, who said that he had just attended a two-week workshop at Princeton devoted to Perelman’s proof. “I think that we have understood the whole paper,” Tian wrote. “It is all right.”
Perelman did not write back. As he explained to us, “I didn’t worry too much myself. This was a famous problem. Some people needed time to get accustomed to the fact that this is no longer a conjecture. I personally decided for myself that it was right for me to stay away from verification and not to participate in all these meetings. It is important for me that I don’t influence this process.”
In July of that year, the National Science Foundation had given nearly a million dollars in grants to Yau, Hamilton, and several students of Yau’s to study and apply Perelman’s “breakthrough.” An entire branch of mathematics had grown up around efforts to solve the Poincaré, and now that branch appeared at risk of becoming obsolete. Michael Freedman, who won a Fields for proving the Poincaré conjecture for the fourth dimension, told the Times that Perelman’s proof was a “small sorrow for this particular branch of topology.” Yuri Burago said, “It kills the field. After this is done, many mathematicians will move to other branches of mathematics.”
Five months later, Chern died, and Yau’s efforts to insure that he-—not Tian—was recognized as his successor turned vicious. “It’s all about their primacy in China and their leadership among the expatriate Chinese,” Joseph Kohn, a former chairman of the Prince-ton mathematics department, said. “Yau’s not jealous of Tian’s mathematics, but he’s jealous of his power back in China.”
Though Yau had not spent more than a few months at a time on mainland China since he was an infant, he was convinced that his status as the only Chinese Fields Medal winner should make him Chern’s successor. In a speech he gave at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, during the summer of 2004, Yau reminded his listeners of his Chinese roots. “When I stepped out from the airplane, I touched the soil of Beijing and felt great joy to be in my mother country,” he said. “I am proud to say that when I was awarded the Fields Medal in mathematics, I held no passport of any country and should certainly be considered Chinese.”
The following summer, Yau returned to China and, in a series of interviews with Chinese reporters, attacked Tian and the mathematicians at Peking University. In an article published in a Beijing science newspaper, which ran under the headline “SHING-TUNG YAU IS SLAMMING ACADEMIC CORRUPTION IN CHINA,” Yau called Tian “a complete mess.” He accused him of holding multiple professorships and of collecting a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for a few months’ work at a Chinese university, while students were living on a hundred dollars a month. He also charged Tian with shoddy scholarship and plagiarism, and with intimidating his graduate students into letting him add his name to their papers. “Since I promoted him all the way to his academic fame today, I should also take responsibility for his improper behavior,” Yau was quoted as saying to a reporter, explaining why he felt obliged to speak out.
