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Comment by cshimmin | Hacker News Reader

Wow, from the 2015 article:

[A journal reviewer of his famous paper says]: "you should be careful. This guy posted a paper once, and it was wrong. He never published it, but he didn’t take it down, either.’ ” The reader meant a paper that Zhang posted on the Web site arxiv.org, where mathematicians often post results before submitting them to a journal, in order to have them seen quickly. Zhang posted a paper in 2007 that fell short of a proof. It concerned another famous problem, the Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture, and he left it up because he hopes to correct it.

Looks like he might have lived up to that!

View on HN

If the proof is right, Zhang is in contention for greatest living mathematician with seven papers total, and on the basis of two of them (and should win all the major prizes he has not won yet and is still eligible for: Abel, Wolf, etc.). Would truly live up to Gauss' motto: "pauca, sed matura!"

Even more incredible is that his own advisor refused to write him letters of recommendation upon graduation [1]

  After graduation, Zhang had trouble finding an academic position. In a 2013 interview with Nautilus magazine, Zhang said he did not get a job after graduation. "During that period it was difficult to find a job in academics. That was a job market problem. Also, my advisor [Tzuong-Tsieng Moh] did not write me letters of recommendation." ... Moh claimed that Zhang never came back to him requesting recommendation letters. In a detailed profile published in The New Yorker magazine in February 2015, Alec Wilkinson wrote Zhang "parted unhappily" with Moh, and that Zhang "left Purdue without Moh's support, and, having published no papers, was unable to find an academic job".

  In 2018, responding to reports of his treatment of Zhang, Moh posted an update on his website. Moh wrote that Zhang "failed miserably" in proving Jacobian conjecture, "never published any paper on algebraic geometry" after leaving Purdue, and "wasted 7 years of his [Zhang's] own life and my [Moh's] time".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang

Yes, if you want to see something incredible (in both the literal sense and the usual sense), read https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf (by Moh).

Yeah I started reading that from the Wiki citation. Yikes. Academia is brutal.

Man, it's so weird and pathetic

All of these guys are probably a hundred times smarter than me or most of the other code monkeys working for the FANGMAN, but they're all squabbling over little 5-figure scraps of grant money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

  In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake

I think it’s their egos they’re squabbling over, not grant money.

Zhang evidently doesn't care about money at all. The same is true for many professonal mathematicians. Caring about money makes it difficult (not impossible) to do anything deep.

In the earlier version I saw (I guess it consists of the non-bold parts), he didn't mention as much negative stuff about Zhang. His claim that Zhang "want to be famous all the time" I regard with suspicion.

> For some 10 years, I had recommended 100 mainland Chinese students to the department and all accepted by the department. I am always indebt to the trust of my judgements by the department. Only very few of them misbehaved, bit the hands which fed them, none of them intended to murder their parents/friends, almost all of them performed well and became well-liked.

No murderers, great success!

It's a reference to Brendt Christensen.

I doubt it, as the non-bolded portions were written in 2013, 4 years prior to the murder of Yingjing Zhang.

I’ve looked it up and wished I had not.

( Interestingly, every summary of the case in media and Wiki stops listing the evidence against him at his secretly taped confession to a girlfriend - confession that included some things absolutely not confirmed. The most convincing evidence to my eyes is the victim’s DNA in the blood found under the carpet and elsewhere there it has survived cleaning efforts. This is not mentioned anywhere except in the court recordings: https://news.wttw.com/sites/default/files/article/file-attac... . Kinda sad what is convincing these days ).

Probably a reference to Yongfei Ci actually (https://dailyillini.com/news-stories/2014/06/20/yongfei-ci-s...)

UIUC is not having a great track record wrt grad student murderers o_O

Wow thanks so much. That is indeed "incredible" on many levels.

It's tragic how the relationship dynamics between Moh and Zhang almost resulted in the total write-off of Zhang and a loss of genius/talent, with nothing left but bitterness and animosity.

I'm glad Zhang was able to find success despite his initial setbacks and from what it seems like in his recent interviews also let go of his bitterness/resentment (holding something like that in your heart can only ever hold you back). And though the power dynamics here were clearly unequal, I don't think it's fair to blame Moh entirely for what happened at Purdue.

I think it's important to remember Moh is also human with all the complexity that comes along with that. In reading his published statement, even though there is no direct apology to Zhang, I sense that he does genuinely regret how things turned out.

Perhaps one day, Zhang and Moh will be able to meet again and resolve/rekindle their relationship.

I think the word eligible is problematic, since it is actually aluding to age discrimination, which is what the Fields medal is doing and what should not be allowed.

One can't really take papers down from arXiv anyway.

Well, you can update them with a disclaimer that points out known issues.

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