看了Omni兄的推荐，我找来《The New Yorker》看了一下。

Nasar同志的这篇文章可能是英文媒体中对中国数学界爆料最多的，有些东西我在中文媒体上都从未见过。中国人和外国人在这点上真是很不同，江才健采访了杨振宁，写出来的东西就一面倒地支持杨，而这位Nasar同志虽然采访了Yau，下笔却毫不留情。这篇文章对Yau在国外的形象会有不小的负面影响（估计北大的人会将它翻译成中文）。

看到杨乐同志著名的50%-25%-30%功劳簿终于走向了世界，以及Nasar的揶揄：Evidently, simple addition can sometimes trip up even a mathematician，真是有点脸红（Nasar还算给杨乐留面子，没提名字）。

不过Nasar对数学典故虽熟，对历史典故三顾茅庐的叙述似乎不怎么样（把诸葛亮说成general听起来怪怪的），把arxiv说成是：a Web site used by mathematicians to post preprints 也很片面（从字面上讲不能算错，但不知道arxiv的人看了准会把它当成数学网站），这后一点对于从事科学报道的人来说还是应该写得更确切一点的。

impression1. good chinese mathematicians r not original. only good at explicate other's original ideas.
impression2. high level chinese mathematicians spent their time in-fighting for power. much inferior to russians or americans
impression3. perelman is a saint. yau a dishonest old hack
impression4. authors are definately pro-tian and very 1-sided. since tian is perelman's friend.
impression5. tian is much better at politics than yau. so good he's almost suspicious to guiding the authors to write this as a weapon to critically wound yau.
impression6. yau need to justify his nsf money and his grant hence the rush to publish

conclusion: i do not buy this story. xixixi.

看完之后感觉猛料的确很多，过瘾。

对丘而言，顺我者昌，逆我者亡。对北大数学系的几位老大而言，亦是顺我者昌，逆我者亡。小巫遇到大巫，北大又不肯低声下气，双方只好同归于尽了。最终受害的，只能是中国的数学。

I think Nasar was not accurate by saying "Poincare used the term 'manifold' to describe such an abstract topological space", this will give readers the false impression that Poincare invented the term "manifold".

Riemann was clearly the first mathematician to invent this term. According to Wikipedia ---

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Bernhard Riemann was the first to do extensive work generalizing the idea of a surface to higher dimensions. The name manifold comes from Riemann's original German term, Mannigfaltigkeit, which William Kingdon Clifford translated as "manifoldness". In his Göttingen inaugural lecture, Riemann described the set of all possible values of a variable with certain constraints as a Mannigfaltigkeit, because the variable can have many values.

He distinguishes between stetige Mannigfaltigkeit and discrete Mannigfaltigkeit (continuous manifoldness and discontinuous manifoldness), depending on whether the value changes continuously or not. As continuous examples, Riemann refers to not only colors and the locations of objects in space, but also the possible shapes of a spatial figure. Using induction, Riemann constructs an n fach ausgedehnte Mannigfaltigkeit (n times extended manifoldness or n-dimensional manifoldness) as a continuous stack of (n−1) dimensional manifoldnesses.

Riemann's intuitive notion of a Mannigfaltigkeit evolved into what is today formalized as a manifold. Riemannian manifolds and Riemann surfaces are named after Bernhard Riemann.
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I'm not even sure if Poincare ever extended Riemann's definition of "manifold" as one of the co-founders of the field of topology. The modern topological definition of "manifold" requires the concept of Hausdorff space, so it seems to me that even Felix Hausdorff contributed more to the modern concept of "manifold" than Henri Poincare.

I assume Nasar's coauthor Gruber is a mathematician, I'm surprised that he also felt comfortable with the sentence quoted above. The New Yorker article's title has the word "Manifold" in it, it's a pity that the authors didn't get the inventor of this critical term correct.

感觉作者的倾向比较明显，主要是批斗丘成桐

"Poincare used the term 'manifold' to describe such an abstract topological space",this will give readers the false impression that Poincare invented the term "manifold".
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Poincare对高维流形的认识直接源自其创立的组合拓扑，源自他对经典空间的简单推广，他本人所研究的不是带Metric（度量）的Manifold



Riemann was clearly the first mathematician to invent this term.
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确切说，Riemann的Manifold概念和现代的topological space是不一样的，现代意义上的Manifold是由Hilbert和Weyl先后严格定义的。Riemann关心的Manifold是带Metric的。