丘成桐为何不为ShengMing Ma仗义执言？

Columbia's attorneys are battling a similar complaint brought by a former Columbia mathematics student, Sheng-Ming Ma, against former mathematics department chair Duong Phong. In a complaint filed in March 1998 in the New York Supreme Court for New York City, Ma claims Phong took a math proof he had done as a thesis project and published it as his own in a paper co-authored with Elias Stein of Princeton University. Phong has denied the allegation in a response to the suit.

Ma's complaint alleges that Phong assigned Ma a problem for his thesis on a mathematical topic involving oscillatory integrals and that he finished a proof in 1995. Phong first rejected the work as flawed, Ma's brief says, but encouraged the student to continue and even suggested that the two might co-author a paper. Later, in March 1997, Ma says, Phong told him the manuscript was "totally wrong" and urged him to focus on another topic.

Ma claims that he sent his draft to other mathematicians for advice. One of them, Stein, gave him a "terrible shock," Ma says: Stein wanted to know why Ma was working on a problem that he and Phong had recently solved and were planning to publish in Acta Mathematica. Stunned at first, Ma says, he soon accused Phong and Stein of plagiarizing his work. Ma acknowledges that his work was not completely original: Phong and Stein had been working on this topic since 1991. But Ma claims that Phong had set this specific problem aside by the time his thesis work began.

Ma sought help from Columbia administrators and others to stop publication of the paper. But few could understand the text, and nearly all the mathematicians Ma contacted sided with Phong. They told Ma that his thesis work was inadequate, and that he was wrong to claim that the Phong-Stein paper, which Acta Mathematica published in November 1997, was plagiarized.

At Ma's insistence, graduate school dean Eduardo Macagno looked into the case, reviewing comments by Phong, Stein, two other Columbia mathematicians, and a Harvard mathematician. Macagno concluded that no plagiarism had occurred. The math department told Ma that he would have to apologize to Phong before he would get a new mentor and that without a mentor, he would have to leave. Ma refused, and Columbia dismissed him in 1997. For a time, Ma says, he worked at a Subway sandwich shop. But, with two master's degrees in math from Columbia, he found a computer-related job. He filed suit in 1998. Mathematician Lawrence Alan Shepp of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is supporting Ma's case but says others must judge whether Ma's work is correct.

Phong declined to comment. Stein says that Ma's argument is "without merit." It was Ma who used his professor's ideas, Stein says, not the other way around: Ma's "got it upside down." He recalls that Phong tried to get Ma to work on a different and difficult subset of the problem the two professors were working on, but that Ma, making no progress, decided to try to duplicate their efforts.

Columbia is asking to have the suit dismissed because it claims to have made a "diligent, complete, and unbiased" investigation before rejecting the complaint. The university also argues that Ma is trying to involve the court in "purely academic decisions" which New York has "repeatedly held to be beyond judicial review." Finally, the university suggests that mathematical principles cannot be plagiarized in any case because they "simply cannot be copyrighted."

If the case does go to trial, it could create a unique problem: The judge, and possibly a jury, might be asked to rule in a few days on who contributed what to a complex scientific proof--the kind of controversy that can take years to resolve among mathematicians.

所有跟帖： 

• 注意，丘成桐在justice comittee里 -。。。- ♀ (0 bytes) () 08/19/2005 postreply 12:31:41

• 回复：丘成桐为何不为ShengMing Ma仗义执言？ -physicist- ♀ (308 bytes) () 08/19/2005 postreply 13:02:08

• 所以也别一个个做圣人状，批这个批那个地 -自己也就那么回事- ♀ (0 bytes) () 08/19/2005 postreply 13:14:49

• 回复：所以也别一个个做圣人状，批这个批那个地 -physicist- ♀ (399 bytes) () 08/19/2005 postreply 16:44:55

• 说到底，读博士就是一个错误！99%的文章是垃圾，跟着造垃圾的 -人混能混出什么- ♀ (174 bytes) () 08/22/2005 postreply 04:48:58

• 有真热爱科研的啊，也有真的好教授，虽然稀有。 -。。。- ♀ (0 bytes) () 08/22/2005 postreply 15:19:16

• 回复：回复：丘成桐为何不为ShengMing Ma仗义执言？ -仗义执言- ♀ (60 bytes) () 08/22/2005 postreply 14:34:58

• Does that mean you know the -realtruth?- ♀ (0 bytes) () 08/22/2005 postreply 15:20:30

• Professor Shepp's Comment: -samecase- ♂ (395 bytes) () 08/22/2005 postreply 20:42:03