Notices of American Mathematical Society
Volume 54, Number 1, January 2007. Page 6
http://www.ams.org/notices/200701/commentary-jan.pdf
Mathematical Community Should Police Itself
I would like to comment on recent events revolving about the awarding
of the Fields Medal to Grigory Perelman, and the article in the New Yorker ma
gazine about it.
I have always felt proud to be a member of a professional community that embr
aces talent, with all the human diversity that can accompany it. As mathemati
cians, we have an extraordinary tolerance of eccentricity, and I truly believ
e that many individuals who might do badly in a different social milieu find
acceptance and thrive in the mathematics community. Sylvia Nasar’s book, A B
eautiful Mind, describes this in rich detail. Reading it, I was proud of our
decency as a community.
But there is another, and a darker, side to the same phenomenon, i.e. a toler
ance for bad behavior, especially when the individuals whose actions might be
questioned are highly talented. To put it plainly, we do not police ourselve
s very well.
I focus on one small part of the complex array of matters discussed in the Na
sar-Gruber article, namely the manner in which the normal peer review process
, essential to the integrity of the profession, was tossed out the window whe
n the paper of Cao and Zhu was accepted for publication in the Asian Journal
of Mathematics (AJM). The submitted paper appears to be mainly an exposition of
Perelman’s work on the Geometrization Conjecture, however it asserted that
there were gaps in Perelman’s proof, which the authors filled. That was a se
rious assertion. The decision to publish the Cao-Zhu paper was made by the tw
o editors-in-chief of the AJM, without consultation with the journal’s twent
y-six member editorial board, even though it was known that the authors had d
eep personal attachments to the editors-in-chief. The members of the editoria
l board of the AJM were notified of the pending
publication a few days before the journal issue appeared, but were not shown
the paper, an abstract, or reports by independent referees. Their names conti
nue to appear on the journal cover, so one must assume that they approved tha
t process. Thus those who were in a position to say “wait a minute, we will
not let our names be used in this way” remained silent. This was just one of
the many moments in this sad tale when there were no whistle-blowers. As a r
esult the entire profession has received a very public and very bad black mar
k.
—Joan S. Birman
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Barnard College and
Columbia University
(Received September 23, 2006)