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Yes, I have to agree with pedantic bore's translation:
"Anderson is (now) afraid of Yau".
Michael T. Anderson (SUNY at Stony Brook) probably thought that he would not be quoted, that his ideas were going to be presented without a direct link to his name. As I'll explain he seems to have had enough motives to use this opportunity to execute his own vendetta against Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard) by instigating reporters to deviate from main topic of the Poincaré Conjecture and Thurston's Geometrization conjecture to an indictment of Yau, and his work.
In my opinion there is little doubt that the article by Gruber and Nasar is grossly biased against Shing-Tung Yau, and to a lesser extent to his collaborators, including Richard S. Hamilton (Columbia). However I don't think that it is correct to blame only the reporters for this. I believe in spite of claims that the quotes are inaccurate, out-of-context, ... they are probably correct. It is common for reporters to face such claims and professionals are normally prepared for possible denials. In fact, we might find out that everything said in this case is recorded on tape.
If we are willing to assume that the quotes are correct, then the question remains: why Nasar and Gruber came up with an article so denigrating of Yau, Hamilton, and/or Chinese mathematics? Most likely they were led into this direction by the people they interviewed.. This does not completely clear them, since they did fail miserably in investigating the possible reasons those interviewed had for badmouthing Shing-Tung Yau and his collaborators.
I'll present just one single example to make my point. To some in the field it has been known that for many years Mike Anderson had also been behind proving Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture, and hence Poincaré's Conjecture. He wrote several extremely long papers and claimed to have proved the conjecture. People were a little suspicious about Anderson's work mainly because it did not involve any new ideas, and because it was so long and almost repetitive. To honor what appeared to be a tremendous achievement by Michael T. Anderson, Shing-Tung Yau, in a very generous and friendly gesture promised to dedicate at least one issueof the Journal of Differential Geometry [jdg] in its entirety exclusively to Anderson's work. Yau is the Editor-in-Chief of this prestigious publication. In contrast with Perelman's choice, Anderson did not post his articles at arxiv.org, or made them very widely available. After the announcements and celebrations the review process started in secrecy, Anderson was probably afraid somebody might fix his gaps and find and fix errors, forcing him to share the honor. However after a few months problems appeared with Anderson's work. Whether they were serious or not is not for me to say. But Yau reluctantly decided that Anderson's work was not up to the high standards of the JDG, and explicitly told him to look for another place to publish his work. Assuming he could fix it.
Mike Anderson sincerely believed he had solved the problem of the century. He even had a celebration at the end of his sequence of summer lectures at Stony Brook, with food and champagne. Peter Zograf (Steklov Mathematical Institute, Saint Petersburg), Dennis Parnell Sullivan (CUNY), and other well known mathematicians were present. Some where privately a little skeptic, but they honored Anderson anyway. After having received all this recognition, and in spite of the existence of objections by the referee, it was probably very hard for Anderson to swallow Yau's refusal to allow his paper to appear in the Journal of Differential Geometry, probably the most prestigious publication for geometers. Anderson appealed Yau's decision. He even tried to get other mathematicians to intercede. But Yau did not see any reasons to change his opinion. At that moment Anderson might have felt that Yau was acting "as a king" by denying him the honor he felt he deserved, that he abusing his power, that he was having oversight where he should not. This goes a long way to explain why Anderson might have felt that he could now present Shing-Tung as a clown, as he effectively did when he reportedly said:
"Yau wants to be the king of geometry"
Yau "believes that everything should issue from him".
Yau believes "that he should have oversight" over everything.
In view of this and other facts, it is hard to imagine that Nasar and Gruber could have been presented by Anderson with a fair evaluation of the role of Shing-Tung Yau and Richard Hamilton in Perelman's work. However these reporters ought to have done more research and at the very least their article ought to have contained a minimal mention that Anderson had been competing for the same honor. Or even better, that Shing-Tung Yau had been perhaps the first prominent mathematician to suggest by his rejection from the JDF that there might be serious problems Anderson's work, effectively liquidating his dreams of claiming the honor of having proved Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture and Poincare's Conjecture.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195062&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=15990882