Interesting letter. I am aware that there was resistance from certain figures because of its portrayal of Yau Shing-Tung, but I had no idea Richard Hamilton sent them a letter about it (it's been 10 years since I read this article).
However, IMO the piece is still worth reading (along with the objections...) in terms of how it gave exposure to solution of the Poincare conjecture.
edit: Heh... it seems I should have followed the developments more closely. It turns out the Cao–Zhu paper was revised that same year:
> On December 3, 2006, Cao and Zhu retracted the original version of their paper, which was titled “A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures — Application of the Hamilton–Perelman Theory of the Ricci Flow”[2] and posted a revised version, renamed, more modestly, "Hamilton–Perelman's Proof of the Poincaré Conjecture and the Geometrization Conjecture".[21] Rather than the claim of the original abstract, "we give a complete proof", suggesting the proof is by the authors, the revised abstract states: "we give a detailed exposition of a complete proof". The authors also took out the phrase "crowning achievement" from the abstract.
Interesting letter. I am aware that there was resistance from certain figures because of its portrayal of Yau Shing-Tung, but I had no idea Richard Hamilton sent them a letter about it (it's been 10 years since I read this article).
However, IMO the piece is still worth reading (along with the objections...) in terms of how it gave exposure to solution of the Poincare conjecture.
edit: Heh... it seems I should have followed the developments more closely. It turns out the Cao–Zhu paper was revised that same year:
> On December 3, 2006, Cao and Zhu retracted the original version of their paper, which was titled “A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures — Application of the Hamilton–Perelman Theory of the Ricci Flow”[2] and posted a revised version, renamed, more modestly, "Hamilton–Perelman's Proof of the Poincaré Conjecture and the Geometrization Conjecture".[21] Rather than the claim of the original abstract, "we give a complete proof", suggesting the proof is by the authors, the revised abstract states: "we give a detailed exposition of a complete proof". The authors also took out the phrase "crowning achievement" from the abstract.