The Fields Medal has indeed gone to Grigory Perelman for his solution to the Poincaré conjecture. He’s pulled a Sartre and has declined the award. Andrei Okounkov of Princeton, Terence Tao of UCLA (age 31) and Wendelin Werner of the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay also won Fields Medals, which are awarded every four years.

Grigory Perelman, a reclusive Russian mathematician who solved a key piece in a century-old puzzle known as the Poincaré conjecture, was one of four mathematicians awarded the Fields Medal today.

But Dr. Perelman refused to accept the medal, as he has other honors, and he did not attend the ceremonies at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

Dr. Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, which is holding the conference, told The Associated Press that he did not think Dr. Perelman’s decision to turn down the award was intended as a snub. “I am sure he did not mean it that way,” he said.

And in the BBC:

Perelman gained international in 2002 and 2003 when he published two papers online that purported to solve the Poincare Conjecture.

The riddle had perplexed mathematicians since it was first posited by Frenchman Henri Poincare in 1904.

It is a central question in topology, the study of the geometrical properties of objects that do not change when the they are stretched, distorted or shrunk.

The hollow shell of the surface of the Earth is what topologists call a two-dimensional sphere. If one were to encircle it with a lasso of string, it could be pulled tight to a point.

On the surface of a doughnut however, a lasso passing through the hole in the centre cannot be shrunk to a point without cutting through the surface meaning that spheres and doughnuts are different from a topological point of view.

Since the 19th Century, mathematicians have known that the sphere is the only enclosed two-dimensional space with this property. But they were uncertain about objects with more dimensions.

The Poincare Conjecture says that a three-dimensional sphere is the only enclosed three-dimensional space with no holes. But proof of the conjecture has so far eluded mathematicians.

Günter Grass’s revelation that he was in the Waffen-SS has created a small tempest. Norman Birnbaum in The Nation:

What Grass did is clear. He has just published an autobiography of his youthful years, Peeling the Onion. For years he maintained that he was drafted as an ordinary conscript, that he had been wounded fighting against the advancing Soviet Army and taken prisoner by the United States. (He recalled being in prison camp with another member of his generation, Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI.) Now, Grass identifies the unit into which he was conscripted in 1944 at age 17 as the Tenth SS Armored Division, the “Jorg von Frundsberg” Division. He describes the SS formations as having a European aura: Volunteers from other European nations joined them “in saving the west from the Bolshevik tide.” He added, “so it was said”–but at the time he was not skeptical. He was attracted by Nazism’s war on bourgeois routine, its own version of permanent revolution. In fact, he had tried unsuccessfully to join the submarine fleet earlier. He described the historic figure after whom the SS division was named as a leader in the sixteenth-century Peasants’ War–a freedom fighter. He was actually a mercenary in princely service against the peasants, and it is grotesque that Grass should describe him as if he were a forerunner of Che Guevara. Jens Jessen of Die Zeit, the German weekly, has it right: Grass was a Nazi of the left.

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance has a great post detailing evidence for dark matter.

What we really want is to take a big cluster of galaxies and simply sweep away all of the ordinary matter. Dark matter, by hypothesis, doesn’t interact directly with ordinary matter, so we can imagine moving the ordinary stuff while leaving the dark stuff behind. If we then check back and determine where the gravity is, it should be pointing either at the left-behind dark matter (if there is such a thing) or still at the ordinary matter (if not).

Happily, the universe has done exactly this for us. In the Bullet Cluster, more formally known as 1E 0657-56, we actually find two clusters of galaxies that have (relatively) recently passed right through each other. It turns out that the large majority (about 90%) of ordinary matter in a cluster is not in the galaxies themselves, but in hot X-ray emitting intergalactic gas. As the two clusters passed through each other, the hot gas in each smacked into the gas in the other, while the individual galaxies and the dark matter (presumed to be collisionless) passed right through. Here’s an mpeg animation of what we think happened. As hinted at in last week’s NASA media advisory, astrophysicists led by Doug Clowe (Arizona) and Maxim Markevitch (CfA) have now compared images of the gas obtained by the Chandra X-ray telescope to “maps” of the gravitational field deduced from weak lensing observations. Their paper is available here in pdf, and will appear on astro-ph this evening. And the answer is: there’s definitely dark matter there!

From The New York Times:

“To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said Kaysar Ridha, 26, of Irvine, Calif., a recent favorite of fans of the popular CBS reality series “Big Brother.” “It’s strange and twisted, because when that attention does come, the irony is you want more privacy.”

For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.

These yearnings can become more acute in life’s later years, as the opportunities for fame dwindle, “but the motive never dies, and when we realize we’re not going to make it in this lifetime, we find some other route: posthumous fame,” said Orville Gilbert Brim, a psychologist who is completing a book called “The Fame Motive.”

More here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists have discovered the fastest bite in the world, one so explosive it can be used to send the Latin American ant that performs it flying through the air to escape predators. Suarez and his colleagues focused on the trap-jaw ant, Odontomachus bauri. Suarez and Fisher, along with University of California at Berkeley researchers Sheila Patek and Joseph Baio, found the ant’s jaws accelerate at 100,000 times the force of gravity. This means they can snap shut 2,300 times faster than a blink of the eye to reach speeds up to 145 mph, exerting forces 300 to 500 times the ant’s body weight.

“Until recently, cameras were simply not fast enough to capture the movement of the mandibles,” Suarez said. He and his colleagues had to use high-speed video cameras capable of taking up to 250,000 frames per second to film the ant jaws, roughly 10,000 faster than speeds movies are usually shot at.

More here.

From Global Day for Darfur:

Despite the signing of a Darfur peace agreement on 5 May 2006, the violence in western Sudan has not stopped; in fact, in some parts of Darfur, the violence has grown worse.

People are still being killed and raped and displaced – every single day.

On September 17 people around the world will take part in the Global Day for Darfur to show world-wide support for the Darfuri people and to put pressure on our Governments to protect the civilians.

We hope that you will be able to join us on the Global Day for Darfur.

More here.  [Thanks to Veronica V. Mittnacht.]

And more info available here.

Julee Holcombe. Babel Revisited. 2004.

Iris print.

More on this fabulously talented artist here (do check out all the images – they’re really cool), and here, and here.

Yitzhak Laor in the London Review of Books:

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.

More here.

Did you recognize Fidel Castro? More portraits here.

William Saletan in Slate:

For thousands of years, we humans have lovingly mutilated our children. We give birth to them, swaddle them, and then cut their genitals. Some people condemn these rituals; others defend them. Now reports from Africa are shaking assumptions on both sides. Our mutilation of girls may be killing them. Our mutilation of boys may be saving their lives.

According to UNICEF, at least 100 million women, largely in Africa, have been genitally disfigured. Two months ago, the World Health Organization reported that these women, compared to their uncut peers, were up to 69 percent more likely to hemorrhage after childbirth and up to 55 percent more likely to deliver a dead or dying baby. For every 100 deliveries, the WHO estimates that female genital mutilation kills one or two extra kids.

More here.

[And in case you are wondering what the picture of watches is doing on this post, consider that Edward Said once told me the following story: Said was in Cairo when his watch broke and he needed to buy another one. He saw a shop window displaying some nice watches and walked in and asked the shopkeeper to show him some watches. The guy replied, “We don’t sell watches, we do circumcisions here.” Said asked him why he displayed watches in the window then. The guy said, “What would you rather have me display?”]

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has attracted widespread acclaim for her fiction about her native Nigeria. Christina Patterson meets a writer wise beyond her years.”

From The Independent:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie nearly missed the e-mail announcing that Africa’s greatest living novelist was her latest fan. “I was sitting in an internet café,” she explains, “and I was about to pass this one by, when I clicked on it and saw it was from Chinua Achebe’s son, Chidi. ‘Daddy read your Purple Hibiscus and loves it’ he said. I couldn’t believe it!”. When she heard his response to her second novel, she cried. “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners,” said Achebe, in a quote now emblazoned on the colourful cover of Half of a Yellow Sun, (Fourth Estate, £14.99), “but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers”. Adichie, he adds “came almost fully made”.

“He sent that quote to my editor in New York,” says Adichie. “Afterwards, he told her that he didn’t believe that a person that age could write that book.” I, too, am finding it quite hard to believe that the girl sitting opposite me is the author of this magisterial novel about one of the most painful episodes in Nigeria’s history, a novel that could – should – have made the Booker longlist this week. Adichie is 28, but she looks much younger.

More here.

Asia is the most masculine continent, and Europe the most feminine, in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Number of men per 100 women [In Society]

Europe: 92.7

North America (US & Canada): 96.9

Latin America: 97.5

Oceania: 99.5

Africa: 99.8

Asia: 103.9

China: 105.6

India: 102.4

Pakistan: 106.6

Bangladesh: 104.5

Taiwan: 103.8

Indonesia: 100.6

Number of boys per 100 girls [At birth]

China: 117 (Jiangxi & Guangdong: 138)

India: 111 (Punjab: 126 Haryana: 125)

Taiwan: 110

Indonesia*: 106

South Korea: 108

Azerbaijan: 115

Georgia: 118

Armenia: 120

* Infants under one year

In news@nature:

Communities of kissing cousins may be at a disadvantage in the plant world, according to a study in this week’s issue of Science.

It is well known that having a number of different plant species in a field can help to promote insect diversity, boost the plants’ productivity and improve the overall ecological health of an area. Now it seems that genetic diversity within a species has similar effects. The findings could lead to better habitat restoration and agriculture.

Gregory Crutsinger, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, studied fields of goldenrod — a weedy perennial that can grow taller than 3 metres and produces clusters of yellow flowers. He first gathered a selection of genetically distinct plants, picking them from patches at least 100 metres apart. He then planted 63 plots of goldenrods in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee. In some plots he planted only one genetic type, in others he grew a range of types.

And Via Lindsay Beyerstein, an excerpt from Mark Haddon’s new novel A Spot of Bother, in the Guardian.

It began when George was trying on a black suit in Allders the week before Bob Green’s funeral. It was not the prospect of the funeral that had unsettled him. Nor Bob dying. To be honest he had always found Bob’s locker-room bonhomie slightly tiring and he was secretly relieved that they would not be playing squash again. Moreover, the manner in which Bob had died (a heart attack while watching the Boat Race on television) was oddly reassuring. Susan had come back from her sister’s and found him lying on his back in the centre of the room with one hand over his eyes, looking so peaceful she thought initially that he was taking a nap.

It would have been painful, obviously. But one could cope with pain. And the endorphins would have kicked in soon enough, followed by that sensation of one’s life rushing before one’s eyes which George himself had experienced several years ago when he had fallen from a stepladder, broken his elbow on the rockery and passed out, a sensation which he remembered as being not unpleasant (a view from the Tamar Bridge in Plymouth had figured prominently for some reason). The same probably went for that tunnel of bright light as the eyes died, given the number of people who heard the angels calling them home and woke to find a junior doctor standing over them with a defibrillator.

Via Delong, Matthew Yglesias has an interesting take on France’s diplomatic strategy in the recent Israel-Lebanon war.

In essence, through two consecutive bait-and-switches — first over the wording of a UN resolution, and second over the deployment of French troops to Lebanon — France managed to get both parties to agree to a return to the status quo ante, which is better for both sides (that’s why the tricks worked), but that neither side could admit to wanting. That’s a pretty good result, especially considering that Chirac spent essentially none of France’s resources achieving it.

Now, yes, it’s true that it would be nice for some gigantic crew of foreigners to come into Lebanon, disarm Hezbollah, police the border, and create a giant, happy, stable democracy at peace with its neighbors. But nobody really knows how to pull this off. The internal political balance in Lebanon is extremely delicate. Nobody — not Israel, not France, not the United States, not even Hezbollah’s patrons — was or is in a position to actually destroy or disarm Hezbollah absent a wider reform of all of Lebanon. The two most recent revisions to the Lebanese domestic scene — the Taif Accords and the Cedar Revolution — both deliberately involved wink-wink acceptance of Hezbollah’s militia in exchange for Shiites not demanding the level of political power in Beirut that demographic realities would suggest. And — with good reason — nobody wants to open up the pandora’s box of Lebanese consociationalism for further revisions.

From Washington Post:

In the past, “nature” was used to maintain the status quo. A physician at Harvard University once cited biology as a reason to bar women from higher education: All that blood rushing to their brains would be drained from their wombs, he claimed, impairing their ability to bear children. Then the pendulum swung the other way. In the 1960s and ’70s, nearly every aspect of human behavior was attributed to “nurture,” including sex differences. If parents raised children the same way, giving dolls to boys and trucks to girls, they’d grow up acting the same.

In the 1990s, the pendulum swung again: A steady flow of books about evolutionary biology explained nearly every aspect of human behavior as a result of the organism’s urge to get its genes into the next generation — the female by ensuring her offspring’s survival, the male by spreading his sperm far and wide. And books such as Ann Moir and David Jessel’s Brain Sex , Deborah Blum’s Sex on the Brain and Melissa Hines’s Brain Gender provided accounts of gender differences based on brain structure and hormonal chemistry.

More here.

From The Bosoton Globe:

MORAL PHILOSOPHERS and academics interested in studying how humans choose between right and wrong often use thought experiments to tease out the principles that inform our decisions. One particular hypothetical scenario has become quite the rage in some top psychological journals. It involves a runaway trolley, five helpless people on the track, and a large-framed man looking on from a footbridge. He may or may not be about to tumble to his bloody demise: You get to make the call. That’s because in this scenario, you are standing on the footbridge, too. You know that if you push the large man off the bridge onto the tracks, his body will stop the trolley before it kills the five people on the tracks. Of course, he will die in the process. So the question is: Is it morally permissible to kill the man in order to save five others?

In surveys, most people (around 85 percent) say they would not push the man to his death. In his forthcoming book, “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong” (Ecco), and in other recent papers, Hauser suggests we may have a moral “faculty” in our brains that acts as a sort of in-house philosopher-parsing situations quickly, before emotion or conscious reason come into play.

More here.

Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker:

In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

More here.

Richard Lea in The Guardian:

The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury has had little time for writing over the past month. “First you have to behave as a citizen, and not a writer. If you have one third of your population [taking refuge] in public schools then you have to help. So there is little time for writing.”

For the moment, a ceasefire holds in the Middle East, but for the region’s writers, as for so many others, chaos and disruption continue…

In Tel Aviv, meanwhile, the real world has caught up with Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom. “I used to write books they called postmodern,” she says, “but now it is pure realism.”

Her latest novel, Textile, was published earlier this year. Over the past month she has been writing, “but not a lot”.

More here.

Paul Vitello in the New York Times:

Among lesbians — the group from which most transgendered men emerge — the increasing number of women who are choosing to pursue life as a man can provoke a deep resentment and almost existential anxiety, raising questions of gender loyalty and political identity, as well as debates about who is and who isn’t, and who never was, a real woman.

The conflict has raged at some women’s colleges and has been explored in academic articles, in magazines for lesbians and in alternative publications, with some — oversimplifying the issue for effect — headlined with the question, “Is Lesbianism Dead?”

It has been a subtext of gay politics in San Francisco, the only city in the country that covers employees’ sex-change medical expenses. And it bubbles to the surface every summer at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a lesbian gathering to which only “women born as women and living as women” are invited — a ban on transgendered people of either sex.

More here.