Did anyone else recieve a press release from Shing-Tung Yau’s lawyer? With no explanation, I was sent this press release from Howard Cooper, Yau’s lawyer, denying the version of events described in Nasar and Gruber’s New Yorker article, Manifold Destiny. There’s nothing in the e-mail, other than press release, so as far as I know they either a) sent it to me because I linked to the New Yorker article, b) sent it to everyone with an e-mail address on this site, or c) everyone in the world. (In fact, I almost deleted the mail as spam without reading it.)

The web version of the press release links to this letter from Cooper to the article’s authors, detailing their specific charges. The letter is careful to make it sound like they could sue, but they haven’t made up their mind to do so yet.