JOLLY DAYS

Conjectures and Proofs

This New Yorker article surveys the personalities involved in the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture. In this case, a shy, somewhat enigmatic mathematician, Grigory Perelman, living in the hinterlands, solves an important puzzle but doesn't present the proof in a conventional way and rejects the Fields Medal — the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. It is very frustrating reading about this great mathematician's passivity, and that is elevated to irritation when you read about another mathematician named Yau, whose vaunting ambitions turn him into a bad guy, poisoned by his drive for acclaim, when all he had to do was rest on his laurels — because Shing-Tung Yau himself is an estimable figure. Human frailties intrude in even the most abstract of human endeavors.