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Việc Perelman không nhận giải Fields năm nay sẽ đi vào lịch sử toán học như một chuyện đáng buồn. Ngoài tính cách tương đối lập dị (dù đôi khi có lý), một trong những lý do chính mà Perelman không nhận giải là vì hắn rất ghét Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard, Fields medalist năm 1982, người Trung Quốc duy nhất thắng giải này). Perelman nghĩ rằng Yau và các học trò tìm cách lấy một phần credit của chứng minh Poincaré conjecture. Tờ New Yorker có bài khá chi tiết và có phỏng vấn Perelman ở St. Petersburg.

On April 13th of this year, the thirty-one mathematicians on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Mathematics received a brief e-mail from Yau and the journal’s co-editor informing them that they had three days to comment on a paper by Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao titled “The Hamilton-Perelman Theory of Ricci Flow: The Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures,” which Yau planned to publish in the journal. The e-mail did not include a copy of the paper, reports from referees, or an abstract. At least one board member asked to see the paper but was told that it was not available. On April 16th, Cao received a message from Yau telling him that the paper had been accepted by the A.J.M., and an abstract was posted on the journal’s Web site.

A month later, Yau had lunch in Cambridge with Jim Carlson, the president of the Clay Institute. He told Carlson that he wanted to trade a copy of Zhu and Cao’s paper for a copy of Tian and Morgan’s book manuscript. Yau told us he was worried that Tian would try to steal from Zhu and Cao’s work, and he wanted to give each party simultaneous access to what the other had written. “I had a lunch with Carlson to request to exchange both manuscripts to make sure that nobody can copy the other,” Yau said. Carlson demurred, explaining that the Clay Institute had not yet received Tian and Morgan’s complete manuscript.

By the end of the following week, the title of Zhu and Cao’s paper on the A.J.M.’s Web site had changed, to “A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures: Application of the Hamilton-Perelman Theory of the Ricci Flow.” The abstract had also been revised. A new sentence explained, “This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci flow.”

Một bài overview của dân toán ở tờ Notices of the AMS viết trung tính hơn một chút. Trong bài này có liên kết đến các slides của một bài giảng của Yau ở Trung Quốc về bài toán Poincaré. Đọc các slides này, có lẽ các bạn sẽ hiểu tại sao Perelman ghét Yau đến vậy.

Lịch sử toán học không thiếu những vụ tranh giành danh tiếng và credit. Có lẽ nổi tiếng nhất là vụ Newton tranh với Leibniz xem ai là người đầu tiên khám phá ra calculus. Tuy nhiên, chưa có vụ nào có vẻ “bẩn bẩn” như vụ này.

Có lẽ Dan Stroock kết luận tốt nhất:

This, essentially, is what Yau’s friends are asking themselves. “I find myself getting annoyed with Yau that he seems to feel the need for more kudos,” Dan Stroock, of M.I.T., said. “This is a guy who did magnificent things, for which he was magnificently rewarded. He won every prize to be won. I find it a little mean of him to seem to be trying to get a share of this as well.” Stroock pointed out that, twenty-five years ago, Yau was in a situation very similar to the one Perelman is in today. His most famous result, on Calabi-Yau manifolds, was hugely important for theoretical physics. “Calabi outlined a program,” Stroock said. “In a real sense, Yau was Calabi’s Perelman. Now he’s on the other side. He’s had no compunction at all in taking the lion’s share of credit for Calabi-Yau. And now he seems to be resenting Perelman getting credit for completing Hamilton’s program. I don’t know if the analogy has ever occurred to him.”

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