记录生活的点滴瞬间

 雕像栩栩如生，就是当年那个嫉恶如仇、匕首投枪的鲁迅。自小就开始学习鲁迅的文章，可从没感觉离这位伟人象今天般的接近过。

 来的路上被仙台硕大的蚊子咬了两口，颇痒，终体会到了《藤野先生》一作里让鲁迅“仅留两个鼻孔出气“的蚊子的厉害，想到这，不由莞尔一笑，甚至有些感激起咬我的蚊子来，让我有了些许鲁迅当年的感受。

 雕像四周绿树环抱，环境甚好。旁立两桩，一云“鲁迅展纪念”，一云“中日不再战の树”，但如此言…

 对着雕像三鞠躬，面对这位写下深透世人灵魂的杂文的一代巨人，除了肃穆和景仰，实无他念。

 先生再见！

9月3日

晚上刘师兄和他夫人如约来接我，在一片整齐划一的小楼中穿梭寻找，找了二十多分钟，终于找到小野教授的家。入室，脱鞋，上楼。楼上客厅处摆了一张圆桌，已有五人，两人分别是芝大放射肿瘤学教授，三人为已经去过或正要去芝大交流学习的日本学生。先英文简单自我介绍，入座。小野教授的夫人端来一道颇特别的菜，一条大鱼，接着递给刘师兄和他夫人一把小捶子，正觉奇怪，只见刘师兄夫妇二人同时捏着小锤子，用力往鱼肚子上敲去，铿锵有力，把鱼肚子给敲破，算是大功告成。小野夫人再把盘子端回厨房处理，解释说是日本的一种风俗习惯，呵呵，于是便不好多问，长见识了^_^

芝大的一位教授正好坐我旁边，是一位很nice却也很frank的女士。问了她好多关于申请方面的问题，她曾经是西北大学的招生委员会成员，所以对Ph.D.的招生程序颇为熟悉，真是问对了人，答疑解惑，澄清了不少错误的看法和认识。

大家都忙着说话，吃的自然就少了，而且也不少意思多吃，周师姐坐我旁边，吃得很小心，几乎没有声音，我也只好学着小口细嚼慢咽了，放在不远处的鸡腿也没好意思去夹，可真是没吃大饱^_^

小野教授问了我很多关于中国的问题，从医院到气候，从饮食到方言，能察觉得出他是一个对中国很有兴趣的人；小野告诉我，很希望下一任日本首相能去中国访问，解开两国之间政治的死结。比起某些政客，小野教授真是一位目光远大的先生。从上周的第一次见面到现在，对于这个男人，我始终抱有一种深深的敬意。昨晚再读鲁迅的《藤野先生》，有了新的感受和认识。小野教授就是和藤野先生颇为相似的一个日本人。他对于我的热切的希望，小而言之，是为我，希望在仙台的这一个月，我能快乐地生活；大而言之，是为两国青年的交流，希望两国能摒弃过去，放眼未来。他的性格，在我的眼里和心里是伟大的，尽管他的姓名并不为许多人所知道。

席间，和一位今年已经毕业的日本学生聊了起来，主要集中于中国的医学学位授予。呵呵，讲了半天，他似乎明白了中国医学科研型和临床型的区别，连声告诉我：中国的医学学位太复杂，太复杂。^_^

晚宴很丰盛，大家聊得也很尽兴，最后合影留念，不过可惜我没带相机，等过几天他们把相片给我吧。

上得车来，和刘师兄、周师姐一说。原来他们也没吃大饱，呵呵，原来不只我一个嘛；于是刘师兄开着车又带着我去吃面，三人大嚼朵颐，不亦乐乎。

On the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a Nobel laureate, assembled in an auditorium at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing for a lecture by the Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau. In the late nineteen-seventies, when Yau was in his twenties, he had made a series of breakthroughs that helped launch the string-theory revolution in physics and earned him, in addition to a Fields Medal—the most coveted award in mathematics—a reputation in both disciplines as a thinker of unrivalled technical power.

Yau had since become a professor of mathematics at Harvard and the director of mathematics institutes in Beijing and Hong Kong, dividing his time between the United States and China. His lecture at the Friendship Hotel was part of an international conference on string theory, which he had organized with the support of the Chinese government, in part to promote the country’s recent advances in theoretical physics. (More than six thousand students attended the keynote address, which was delivered by Yau’s close friend Stephen Hawking, in the Great Hall of the People.) The subject of Yau’s talk was something that few in his audience knew much about: the Poincaré conjecture, a century-old conundrum about the characteristics of three-dimensional spheres, which, because it has important implications for mathematics and cosmology and because it has eluded all attempts at solution, is regarded by mathematicians as a holy grail.

Yau, a stocky man of fifty-seven, stood at a lectern in shirtsleeves and black-rimmed glasses and, with his hands in his pockets, described how two of his students, Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao, had completed a proof of the Poincaré conjecture a few weeks earlier. “I’m very positive about Zhu and Cao’s work,” Yau said. “Chinese mathematicians should have every reason to be proud of such a big success in completely solving the puzzle.” He said that Zhu and Cao were indebted to his longtime American collaborator Richard Hamilton, who deserved most of the credit for solving the Poincaré. He also mentioned Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician who, he acknowledged, had made an important contribution. Nevertheless, Yau said, “in Perelman’s work, spectacular as it is, many key ideas of the proofs are sketched or outlined, and complete details are often missing.” He added, “We would like to get Perelman to make comments. But Perelman resides in St. Petersburg and refuses to communicate with other people.”

For ninety minutes, Yau discussed some of the technical details of his students’ proof. When he was finished, no one asked any questions. That night, however, a Brazilian physicist posted a report of the lecture on his blog. “Looks like China soon will take the lead also in mathematics,” he wrote.

Grigory Perelman is indeed reclusive. He left his job as a researcher at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, in St. Petersburg, last December; he has few friends; and he lives with his mother in an apartment on the outskirts of the city. Although he had never granted an interview before, he was cordial and frank when we visited him, in late June, shortly after Yau’s conference in Beijing, taking us on a long walking tour of the city. “I’m looking for some friends, and they don’t have to be mathematicians,” he said. The week before the conference, Perelman had spent hours discussing the Poincaré conjecture with Sir John M. Ball, the fifty-eight-year-old president of the International Mathematical Union, the discipline’s influential professional association. The meeting, which took place at a conference center in a stately mansion overlooking the Neva River, was highly unusual. At the end of May, a committee of nine prominent mathematicians had voted to award Perelman a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré, and Ball had gone to St. Petersburg to persuade him to accept the prize in a public ceremony at the I.M.U.’s quadrennial congress, in Madrid, on August 22nd.

The Fields Medal, like the Nobel Prize, grew, in part, out of a desire to elevate science above national animosities. German mathematicians were excluded from the first I.M.U. congress, in 1924, and, though the ban was lifted before the next one, the trauma it caused led, in 1936, to the establishment of the Fields, a prize intended to be “as purely international and impersonal as possible.”

However, the Fields Medal, which is awarded every four years, to between two and four mathematicians, is supposed not only to reward past achievements but also to stimulate future research; for this reason, it is given only to mathematicians aged forty and younger. In recent decades, as the number of professional mathematicians has grown, the Fields Medal has become increasingly prestigious. Only forty-four medals have been awarded in nearly seventy years—including three for work closely related to the Poincaré conjecture—and no mathematician has ever refused the prize. Nevertheless, Perelman told Ball that he had no intention of accepting it. “I refuse,” he said simply.

Over a period of eight months, beginning in November, 2002, Perelman posted a proof of the Poincaré on the Internet in three installments. Like a sonnet or an aria, a mathematical proof has a distinct form and set of conventions. It begins with axioms, or accepted truths, and employs a series of logical statements to arrive at a conclusion. If the logic is deemed to be watertight, then the result is a theorem. Unlike proof in law or science, which is based on evidence and therefore subject to qualification and revision, a proof of a theorem is definitive. Judgments about the accuracy of a proof are mediated by peer-reviewed journals; to insure fairness, reviewers are supposed to be carefully chosen by journal editors, and the identity of a scholar whose pa-per is under consideration is kept secret. Publication implies that a proof is complete, correct, and original.

By these standards, Perelman’s proof was unorthodox. It was astonishingly brief for such an ambitious piece of work; logic sequences that could have been elaborated over many pages were often severely compressed. Moreover, the proof made no direct mention of the Poincaré and included many elegant results that were irrelevant to the central argument. But, four years later, at least two teams of experts had vetted the proof and had found no significant gaps or errors in it. A consensus was emerging in the math community: Perelman had solved the Poincaré. Even so, the proof’s complexity—and Perelman’s use of shorthand in making some of his most important claims—made it vulnerable to challenge. Few mathematicians had the expertise necessary to evaluate and defend it.

After giving a series of lectures on the proof in the United States in 2003, Perelman returned to St. Petersburg. Since then, although he had continued to answer queries about it by e-mail, he had had minimal contact with colleagues and, for reasons no one understood, had not tried to publish it. Still, there was little doubt that Perelman, who turned forty on June 13th, deserved a Fields Medal. As Ball planned the I.M.U.’s 2006 congress, he began to conceive of it as a historic event. More than three thousand mathematicians would be attending, and King Juan Carlos of Spain had agreed to preside over the awards ceremony. The I.M.U.’s newsletter predicted that the congress would be remembered as “the occasion when this conjecture became a theorem.” Ball, determined to make sure that Perelman would be there, decided to go to St. Petersburg.

Ball wanted to keep his visit a secret—the names of Fields Medal recipients are announced officially at the awards ceremony—and the conference center where he met with Perelman was deserted. For ten hours over two days, he tried to persuade Perelman to agree to accept the prize. Perelman, a slender, balding man with a curly beard, bushy eyebrows, and blue-green eyes, listened politely. He had not spoken English for three years, but he fluently parried Ball’s entreaties, at one point taking Ball on a long walk—one of Perelman’s favorite activities. As he summed up the conversation two weeks later: “He proposed to me three alternatives: accept and come; accept and don’t come, and we will send you the medal later; third, I don’t accept the prize. From the very beginning, I told him I have chosen the third one.” The Fields Medal held no interest for him, Perelman explained. “It was completely irrelevant for me,” he said. “Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.”

Proofs of the Poincaré have been announced nearly every year since the conjecture was formulated, by Henri Poincaré, more than a hundred years ago. Poincaré was a cousin of Raymond Poincaré, the President of France during the First World War, and one of the most creative mathematicians of the nineteenth century. Slight, myopic, and notoriously absent-minded, he conceived his famous problem in 1904, eight years before he died, and tucked it as an offhand question into the end of a sixty-five-page paper.

Poincaré didn’t make much progress on proving the conjecture. “Cette question nous entraînerait trop loin” (“This question would take us too far”), he wrote. He was a founder of topology, also known as “rubber-sheet geometry,” for its focus on the intrinsic properties of spaces. From a topologist’s perspective, there is no difference between a bagel and a coffee cup with a handle. Each has a single hole and can be manipulated to resemble the other without being torn or cut. Poincaré used the term “manifold” to describe such an abstract topological space. The simplest possible two-dimensional manifold is the surface of a soccer ball, which, to a topologist, is a sphere—even when it is stomped on, stretched, or crumpled. The proof that an object is a so-called two-sphere, since it can take on any number of shapes, is that it is “simply connected,” meaning that no holes puncture it. Unlike a soccer ball, a bagel is not a true sphere. If you tie a slipknot around a soccer ball, you can easily pull the slipknot closed by sliding it along the surface of the ball. But if you tie a slipknot around a bagel through the hole in its middle you cannot pull the slipknot closed without tearing the bagel.

Two-dimensional manifolds were well understood by the mid-nineteenth century. But it remained unclear whether what was true for two dimensions was also true for three. Poincaré proposed that all closed, simply connected, three-dimensional manifolds—those which lack holes and are of finite extent—were spheres. The conjecture was potentially important for scientists studying the largest known three-dimensional manifold: the universe. Proving it mathematically, however, was far from easy. Most attempts were merely embarrassing, but some led to important mathematical discoveries, including proofs of Dehn’s Lemma, the Sphere Theorem, and the Loop Theorem, which are now fundamental concepts in topology.

By the nineteen-sixties, topology had become one of the most productive areas of mathematics, and young topologists were launching regular attacks on the Poincaré. To the astonishment of most mathematicians, it turned out that manifolds of the fourth, fifth, and higher dimensions were more tractable than those of the third dimension. By 1982, Poincaré’s conjecture had been proved in all dimensions except the third. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute, a private foundation that promotes mathematical research, named the Poincaré one of the seven most important outstanding problems in mathematics and offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove it.

“My whole life as a mathematician has been dominated by the Poincaré conjecture,” John Morgan, the head of the mathematics department at Columbia University, said. “I never thought I’d see a solution. I thought nobody could touch it.”

Grigory Perelman did not plan to become a mathematician. “There was never a decision point,” he said when we met. We were outside the apartment building where he lives, in Kupchino, a neighborhood of drab high-rises. Perelman’s father, who was an electrical engineer, encouraged his interest in math. “He gave me logical and other math problems to think about,” Perelman said. “He got a lot of books for me to read. He taught me how to play chess. He was proud of me.” Among the books his father gave him was a copy of “Physics for Entertainment,” which had been a best-seller in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-thirties. In the foreword, the book’s author describes the contents as “conundrums, brain-teasers, entertaining anecdotes, and unexpected comparisons,” adding, “I have quoted extensively from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain and other writers, because, besides providing entertainment, the fantastic experiments these writers describe may well serve as instructive illustrations at physics classes.” The book’s topics included how to jump from a moving car, and why, “according to the law of buoyancy, we would never drown in the Dead Sea.”

The notion that Russian society considered worthwhile what Perelman did for pleasure came as a surprise. By the time he was fourteen, he was the star performer of a local math club. In 1982, the year that Shing-Tung Yau won a Fields Medal, Perelman earned a perfect score and the gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad, in Budapest. He was friendly with his teammates but not close—“I had no close friends,” he said. He was one of two or three Jews in his grade, and he had a passion for opera, which also set him apart from his peers. His mother, a math teacher at a technical college, played the violin and began taking him to the opera when he was six. By the time Perelman was fifteen, he was spending his pocket money on records. He was thrilled to own a recording of a famous 1946 performance of “La Traviata,” featuring Licia Albanese as Violetta. “Her voice was very good,” he said.

At Leningrad University, which Perelman entered in 1982, at the age of sixteen, he took advanced classes in geometry and solved a problem posed by Yuri Burago, a mathematician at the Steklov Institute, who later became his Ph.D. adviser. “There are a lot of students of high ability who speak before thinking,” Burago said. “Grisha was different. He thought deeply. His answers were always correct. He always checked very, very carefully.” Burago added, “He was not fast. Speed means nothing. Math doesn’t depend on speed. It is about deep.”

At the Steklov in the early nineties, Perelman became an expert on the geometry of Riemannian and Alexandrov spaces—extensions of traditional Euclidean geometry—and began to publish articles in the leading Russian and American mathematics journals. In 1992, Perelman was invited to spend a semester each at New York University and Stony Brook University. By the time he left for the United States, that fall, the Russian economy had collapsed. Dan Stroock, a mathematician at M.I.T., recalls smuggling wads of dollars into the country to deliver to a retired mathematician at the Steklov, who, like many of his colleagues, had become destitute.

Perelman was pleased to be in the United States, the capital of the international mathematics community. He wore the same brown corduroy jacket every day and told friends at N.Y.U. that he lived on a diet of bread, cheese, and milk. He liked to walk to Brooklyn, where he had relatives and could buy traditional Russian brown bread. Some of his colleagues were taken aback by his fingernails, which were several inches long. “If they grow, why wouldn’t I let them grow?” he would say when someone asked why he didn’t cut them. Once a week, he and a young Chinese mathematician named Gang Tian drove to Princeton, to attend a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study.

For several decades, the institute and nearby Princeton University had been centers of topological research. In the late seventies, William Thurston, a Princeton mathematician who liked to test out his ideas using scissors and construction paper, proposed a taxonomy for classifying manifolds of three dimensions. He argued that, while the manifolds could be made to take on many different shapes, they nonetheless had a “preferred” geometry, just as a piece of silk draped over a dressmaker’s mannequin takes on the mannequin’s form.

Thurston proposed that every three-dimensional manifold could be broken down into one or more of eight types of component, including a spherical type. Thurston’s theory—which became known as the geometrization conjecture—describes all possible three-dimensional manifolds and is thus a powerful generalization of the Poincaré. If it was confirmed, then Poincaré’s conjecture would be, too. Proving Thurston and Poincaré “definitely swings open doors,” Barry Mazur, a mathematician at Harvard, said. The implications of the conjectures for other disciplines may not be apparent for years, but for mathematicians the problems are fundamental. “This is a kind of twentieth-century Pythagorean theorem,” Mazur added. “It changes the landscape.”

In 1982, Thurston won a Fields Medal for his contributions to topology. That year, Richard Hamilton, a mathematician at Cornell, published a paper on an equation called the Ricci flow, which he suspected could be relevant for solving Thurston’s conjecture and thus the Poincaré. Like a heat equation, which describes how heat distributes itself evenly through a substance—flowing from hotter to cooler parts of a metal sheet, for example—to create a more uniform temperature, the Ricci flow, by smoothing out irregularities, gives manifolds a more uniform geometry.

Hamilton, the son of a Cincinnati doctor, defied the math profession’s nerdy stereotype. Brash and irreverent, he rode horses, windsurfed, and had a succession of girlfriends. He treated math as merely one of life’s pleasures. At forty-nine, he was considered a brilliant lecturer, but he had published relatively little beyond a series of seminal articles on the Ricci flow, and he had few graduate students. Perelman had read Hamilton’s papers and went to hear him give a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study. Afterward, Perelman shyly spoke to him.

“I really wanted to ask him something,” Perelman recalled. “He was smiling, and he was quite patient. He actually told me a couple of things that he published a few years later. He did not hesitate to tell me. Hamilton’s openness and generosity—it really attracted me. I can’t say that most mathematicians act like that.

“I was working on different things, though occasionally I would think about the Ricci flow,” Perelman added. “You didn’t have to be a great mathematician to see that this would be useful for geometrization. I felt I didn’t know very much. I kept asking questions.”

Shing-Tung Yau was also asking Hamilton questions about the Ricci flow. Yau and Hamilton had met in the seventies, and had become close, despite considerable differences in temperament and background. A mathematician at the University of California at San Diego who knows both men called them “the mathematical loves of each other’s lives.”

Yau’s family moved to Hong Kong from mainland China in 1949, when he was five months old, along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees fleeing Mao’s armies. The previous year, his father, a relief worker for the United Nations, had lost most of the family’s savings in a series of failed ventures. In Hong Kong, to support his wife and eight children, he tutored college students in classical Chinese literature and philosophy.

When Yau was fourteen, his father died of kidney cancer, leaving his mother dependent on handouts from Christian missionaries and whatever small sums she earned from selling handicrafts. Until then, Yau had been an indifferent student. But he began to devote himself to schoolwork, tutoring other students in math to make money. “Part of the thing that drives Yau is that he sees his own life as being his father’s revenge,” said Dan Stroock, the M.I.T. mathematician, who has known Yau for twenty years. “Yau’s father was like the Talmudist whose children are starving.”

Yau studied math at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he attracted the attention of Shiing-Shen Chern, the preëminent Chinese mathematician, who helped him win a scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley. Chern was the author of a famous theorem combining topology and geometry. He spent most of his career in the United States, at Berkeley. He made frequent visits to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and, later, China, where he was a revered symbol of Chinese intellectual achievement, to promote the study of math and science.

In 1969, Yau started graduate school at Berkeley, enrolling in seven graduate courses each term and auditing several others. He sent half of his scholarship money back to his mother in China and impressed his professors with his tenacity. He was obliged to share credit for his first major result when he learned that two other mathematicians were working on the same problem. In 1976, he proved a twenty-year-old conjecture pertaining to a type of manifold that is now crucial to string theory. A French mathematician had formulated a proof of the problem, which is known as Calabi’s conjecture, but Yau’s, because it was more general, was more powerful. (Physicists now refer to Calabi-Yau manifolds.) “He was not so much thinking up some original way of looking at a subject but solving extremely hard technical problems that at the time only he could solve, by sheer intellect and force of will,” Phillip Griffiths, a geometer and a former director of the Institute for Advanced Study, said.

In 1980, when Yau was thirty, he became one of the youngest mathematicians ever to be appointed to the permanent faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study, and he began to attract talented students. He won a Fields Medal two years later, the first Chinese ever to do so. By this time, Chern was seventy years old and on the verge of retirement. According to a relative of Chern’s, “Yau decided that he was going to be the next famous Chinese mathematician and that it was time for Chern to step down.”

Harvard had been trying to recruit Yau, and when, in 1983, it was about to make him a second offer Phillip Griffiths told the dean of faculty a version of a story from “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” a Chinese classic. In the third century A.D., a Chinese warlord dreamed of creating an empire, but the most brilliant general in China was working for a rival. Three times, the warlord went to his enemy’s kingdom to seek out the general. Impressed, the general agreed to join him, and together they succeeded in founding a dynasty. Taking the hint, the dean flew to Philadelphia, where Yau lived at the time, to make him an offer. Even so, Yau turned down the job. Finally, in 1987, he agreed to go to Harvard.

Yau’s entrepreneurial drive extended to collaborations with colleagues and students, and, in addition to conducting his own research, he began organizing seminars. He frequently allied himself with brilliantly inventive mathematicians, including Richard Schoen and William Meeks. But Yau was especially impressed by Hamilton, as much for his swagger as for his imagination. “I can have fun with Hamilton,” Yau told us during the string-theory conference in Beijing. “I can go swimming with him. I go out with him and his girlfriends and all that.” Yau was convinced that Hamilton could use the Ricci-flow equation to solve the Poincaré and Thurston conjectures, and he urged him to focus on the problems. “Meeting Yau changed his mathematical life,” a friend of both mathematicians said of Hamilton. “This was the first time he had been on to something extremely big. Talking to Yau gave him courage and direction.”

Yau believed that if he could help solve the Poincaré it would be a victory not just for him but also for China. In the mid-nineties, Yau and several other Chinese scholars began meeting with President Jiang Zemin to discuss how to rebuild the country’s scientific institutions, which had been largely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Chinese universities were in dire condition. According to Steve Smale, who won a Fields for proving the Poincaré in higher dimensions, and who, after retiring from Berkeley, taught in Hong Kong, Peking University had “halls filled with the smell of urine, one common room, one office for all the assistant professors,” and paid its faculty wretchedly low salaries. Yau persuaded a Hong Kong real-estate mogul to help finance a mathematics institute at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, and to endow a Fields-style medal for Chinese mathematicians under the age of forty-five. On his trips to China, Yau touted Hamilton and their joint work on the Ricci flow and the Poincaré as a model for young Chinese mathematicians. As he put it in Beijing, “They always say that the whole country should learn from Mao or some big heroes. So I made a joke to them, but I was half serious. I said the whole country should learn from Hamilton.”

Grigory Perelman was learning from Hamilton already. In 1993, he began a two-year fellowship at Berkeley. While he was there, Hamilton gave several talks on campus, and in one he mentioned that he was working on the Poincaré. Hamilton’s Ricci-flow strategy was extremely technical and tricky to execute. After one of his talks at Berkeley, he told Perelman about his biggest obstacle. As a space is smoothed under the Ricci flow, some regions deform into what mathematicians refer to as “singularities.” Some regions, called “necks,” become attenuated areas of infinite density. More troubling to Hamilton was a kind of singularity he called the “cigar.” If cigars formed, Hamilton worried, it might be impossible to achieve uniform geometry. Perelman realized that a paper he had written on Alexandrov spaces might help Hamilton prove Thurston’s conjecture—and the Poincaré—once Hamilton solved the cigar problem. “At some point, I asked Hamilton if he knew a certain collapsing result that I had proved but not published—which turned out to be very useful,” Perelman said. “Later, I realized that he didn’t understand what I was talking about.” Dan Stroock, of M.I.T., said, “Perelman may have learned stuff from Yau and Hamilton, but, at the time, they were not learning from him.”

By the end of his first year at Berkeley, Perelman had written several strikingly original papers. He was asked to give a lecture at the 1994 I.M.U. congress, in Zurich, and invited to apply for jobs at Stanford, Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Tel Aviv. Like Yau, Perelman was a formidable problem solver. Instead of spending years constructing an intricate theoretical framework, or defining new areas of research, he focussed on obtaining particular results. According to Mikhail Gromov, a renowned Russian geometer who has collaborated with Perelman, he had been trying to overcome a technical difficulty relating to Alexandrov spaces and had apparently been stumped. “He couldn’t do it,” Gromov said. “It was hopeless.”

Perelman told us that he liked to work on several problems at once. At Berkeley, however, he found himself returning again and again to Hamilton’s Ricci-flow equation and the problem that Hamilton thought he could solve with it. Some of Perelman’s friends noticed that he was becoming more and more ascetic. Visitors from St. Petersburg who stayed in his apartment were struck by how sparsely furnished it was. Others worried that he seemed to want to reduce life to a set of rigid axioms. When a member of a hiring committee at Stanford asked him for a C.V. to include with requests for letters of recommendation, Perelman balked. “If they know my work, they don’t need my C.V.,” he said. “If they need my C.V., they don’t know my work.”

Ultimately, he received several job offers. But he declined them all, and in the summer of 1995 returned to St. Petersburg, to his old job at the Steklov Institute, where he was paid less than a hundred dollars a month. (He told a friend that he had saved enough money in the United States to live on for the rest of his life.) His father had moved to Israel two years earlier, and his younger sister was planning to join him there after she finished college. His mother, however, had decided to remain in St. Petersburg, and Perelman moved in with her. “I realize that in Russia I work better,” he told colleagues at the Steklov.

At twenty-nine, Perelman was firmly established as a mathematician and yet largely unburdened by professional responsibilities. He was free to pursue whatever problems he wanted to, and he knew that his work, should he choose to publish it, would be shown serious consideration. Yakov Eliashberg, a mathematician at Stanford who knew Perelman at Berkeley, thinks that Perelman returned to Russia in order to work on the Poincaré. “Why not?” Perelman said when we asked whether Eliashberg’s hunch was correct.

The Internet made it possible for Perelman to work alone while continuing to tap a common pool of knowledge. Perelman searched Hamilton’s papers for clues to his thinking and gave several seminars on his work. “He didn’t need any help,” Gromov said. “He likes to be alone. He reminds me of Newton—this obsession with an idea, working by yourself, the disregard for other people’s opinion. Newton was more obnoxious. Perelman is nicer, but very obsessed.”

In 1995, Hamilton published a paper in which he discussed a few of his ideas for completing a proof of the Poincaré. Reading the paper, Perelman realized that Hamilton had made no progress on overcoming his obstacles—the necks and the cigars. “I hadn’t seen any evidence of progress after early 1992,” Perelman told us. “Maybe he got stuck even earlier.” However, Perelman thought he saw a way around the impasse. In 1996, he wrote Hamilton a long letter outlining his notion, in the hope of collaborating. “He did not answer,” Perelman said. “So I decided to work alone.”

Yau had no idea that Hamilton’s work on the Poincaré had stalled. He was increasingly anxious about his own standing in the mathematics profession, particularly in China, where, he worried, a younger scholar could try to supplant him as Chern’s heir. More than a decade had passed since Yau had proved his last major result, though he continued to publish prolifically. “Yau wants to be the king of geometry,” Michael Anderson, a geometer at Stony Brook, said. “He believes that everything should issue from him, that he should have oversight. He doesn’t like people encroaching on his territory.” Determined to retain control over his field, Yau pushed his students to tackle big problems. At Harvard, he ran a notoriously tough seminar on differential geometry, which met for three hours at a time three times a week. Each student was assigned a recently published proof and asked to reconstruct it, fixing any errors and filling in gaps. Yau believed that a mathematician has an obligation to be explicit, and impressed on his students the importance of step-by-step rigor.

There are two ways to get credit for an original contribution in mathematics. The first is to produce an original proof. The second is to identify a significant gap in someone else’s proof and supply the missing chunk. However, only true mathematical gaps—missing or mistaken arguments—can be the basis for a claim of originality. Filling in gaps in exposition—shortcuts and abbreviations used to make a proof more efficient—does not count. When, in 1993, Andrew Wiles revealed that a gap had been found in his proof of Fermat’s last theorem, the problem became fair game for anyone, until, the following year, Wiles fixed the error. Most mathematicians would agree that, by contrast, if a proof’s implicit steps can be made explicit by an expert, then the gap is merely one of exposition, and the proof should be considered complete and correct.

Occasionally, the difference between a mathematical gap and a gap in exposition can be hard to discern. On at least one occasion, Yau and his students have seemed to confuse the two, making claims of originality that other mathematicians believe are unwarranted. In 1996, a young geometer at Berkeley named Alexander Givental had proved a mathematical conjecture about mirror symmetry, a concept that is fundamental to string theory. Though other mathematicians found Givental’s proof hard to follow, they were optimistic that he had solved the problem. As one geometer put it, “Nobody at the time said it was incomplete and incorrect.”

In the fall of 1997, Kefeng Liu, a former student of Yau’s who taught at Stanford, gave a talk at Harvard on mirror symmetry. According to two geometers in the audience, Liu proceeded to present a proof strikingly similar to Givental’s, describing it as a paper that he had co-authored with Yau and another student of Yau’s. “Liu mentioned Givental but only as one of a long list of people who had contributed to the field,” one of the geometers said. (Liu maintains that his proof was significantly different from Givental’s.)

Around the same time, Givental received an e-mail signed by Yau and his collaborators, explaining that they had found his arguments impossible to follow and his notation baffling, and had come up with a proof of their own. They praised Givental for his “brilliant idea” and wrote, “In the final version of our paper your important contribution will be acknowledged.”

A few weeks later, the paper, “Mirror Principle I,” appeared in the Asian Journal of Mathematics, which is co-edited by Yau. In it, Yau and his coauthors describe their result as “the first complete proof” of the mirror conjecture. They mention Givental’s work only in passing. “Unfortunately,” they write, his proof, “which has been read by many prominent experts, is incomplete.” However, they did not identify a specific mathematical gap.

Givental was taken aback. “I wanted to know what their objection was,” he told us. “Not to expose them or defend myself.” In March, 1998, he published a paper that included a three-page footnote in which he pointed out a number of similarities between Yau’s proof and his own. Several months later, a young mathematician at the University of Chicago who was asked by senior colleagues to investigate the dispute concluded that Givental’s proof was complete. Yau says that he had been working on the proof for years with his students and that they achieved their result independently of Givental. “We had our own ideas, and we wrote them up,” he says.

Around this time, Yau had his first serious conflict with Chern and the Chinese mathematical establishment. For years, Chern had been hoping to bring the I.M.U.’s congress to Beijing. According to several mathematicians who were active in the I.M.U. at the time, Yau made an eleventh-hour effort to have the congress take place in Hong Kong instead. But he failed to persuade a sufficient number of colleagues to go along with his proposal, and the I.M.U. ultimately decided to hold the 2002 congress in Beijing. (Yau denies that he tried to bring the congress to Hong Kong.) Among the delegates the I.M.U. appointed to a group that would be choosing speakers for the congress was Yau’s most successful student, Gang Tian, who had been at N.Y.U. with Perelman and was now a professor at M.I.T. The host committee in Beijing also asked Tian to give a plenary address.

Yau was caught by surprise. In March, 2000, he had published a survey of recent research in his field studded with glowing references to Tian and to their joint projects. He retaliated by organizing his first conference on string theory, which opened in Beijing a few days before the math congress began, in late August, 2002. He persuaded Stephen Hawking and several Nobel laureates to attend, and for days the Chinese newspapers were full of pictures of famous scientists. Yau even managed to arrange for his group to have an audience with Jiang Zemin. A mathematician who helped organize the math congress recalls that along the highway between Beijing and the airport there were “billboards with pictures of Stephen Hawking plastered everywhere.”

That summer, Yau wasn’t thinking much about the Poincaré. He had confidence in Hamilton, despite his slow pace. “Hamilton is a very good friend,” Yau told us in Beijing. “He is more than a friend. He is a hero. He is so original. We were working to finish our proof. Hamilton worked on it for twenty-five years. You work, you get tired. He probably got a little tired—and you want to take a rest.”

Then, on November 12, 2002, Yau received an e-mail message from a Russian mathematician whose name didn’t immediately register. “May I bring to your attention my paper,” the e-mail said.

On November 11th, Perelman had posted a thirty-nine-page paper entitled “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applications,” on arXiv.org, a Web site used by mathematicians to post preprints—articles awaiting publication in refereed journals. He then e-mailed an abstract of his paper to a dozen mathematicians in the United States—including Hamilton, Tian, and Yau—none of whom had heard from him for years. In the abstract, he explained that he had written “a sketch of an eclectic proof” of the geometrization conjecture.

Perelman had not mentioned the proof or shown it to anyone. “I didn’t have any friends with whom I could discuss this,” he said in St. Petersburg. “I didn’t want to discuss my work with someone I didn’t trust.” Andrew Wiles had also kept the fact that he was working on Fermat’s last theorem a secret, but he had had a colleague vet the proof before making it public. Perelman, by casually posting a proof on the Internet of one of the most famous problems in mathematics, was not just flouting academic convention but taking a considerable risk. If the proof was flawed, he would be publicly humiliated, and there would be no way to prevent another mathematician from fixing any errors and claiming victory. But Perelman said he was not particularly concerned. “My reasoning was: if I made an error and someone used my work to construct a correct proof I would be pleased,” he said. “I never set out to be the sole solver of the Poincaré.”

Gang Tian was in his office at M.I.T. when he received Perelman’s e-mail. He and Perelman had been friendly in 1992, when they were both at N.Y.U. and had attended the same weekly math seminar in Princeton. “I immediately realized its importance,” Tian said of Perelman’s paper. Tian began to read the paper and discuss it with colleagues, who were equally enthusiastic.

On November 19th, Vitali Kapovitch, a geometer, sent Perelman an e-mail:

Hi Grisha, Sorry to bother you but a lot of people are asking me about your preprint “The entropy formula for the Ricci . . .” Do I understand it correctly that while you cannot yet do all the steps in the Hamilton program you can do enough so that using some collapsing results you can prove geometrization? Vitali.

Perelman’s response, the next day, was terse: “That’s correct. Grisha.”

In fact, what Perelman had posted on the Internet was only the first installment of his proof. But it was sufficient for mathematicians to see that he had figured out how to solve the Poincaré. Barry Mazur, the Harvard mathematician, uses the image of a dented fender to describe Perelman’s achievement: “Suppose your car has a dented fender and you call a mechanic to ask how to smooth it out. The mechanic would have a hard time telling you what to do over the phone. You would have to bring the car into the garage for him to examine. Then he could tell you where to give it a few knocks. What Hamilton introduced and Perelman completed is a procedure that is independent of the particularities of the blemish. If you apply the Ricci flow to a 3-D space, it will begin to undent it and smooth it out. The mechanic would not need to even see the car—just apply the equation.” Perelman proved that the “cigars” that had troubled Hamilton could not actually occur, and he showed that the “neck” problem could be solved by performing an intricate sequence of mathematical surgeries: cutting out singularities and patching up the raw edges. “Now we have a procedure to smooth things and, at crucial points, control the breaks,” Mazur said.

Tian wrote to Perelman, asking him to lecture on his paper at M.I.T. Colleagues at Princeton and Stony Brook extended similar invitations. Perelman accepted them all and was booked for a month of lectures beginning in April, 2003. “Why not?” he told us with a shrug. Speaking of mathematicians generally, Fedor Nazarov, a mathematician at Michigan State University, said, “After you’ve solved a problem, you have a great urge to talk about it.”

Hamilton and Yau were stunned by Perelman’s announcement. “We felt that nobody else would be able to discover the solution,” Yau told us in Beijing. “But then, in 2002, Perelman said that he published something. He basically did a shortcut without doing all the detailed estimates that we did.” Moreover, Yau complained, Perelman’s proof “was written in such a messy way that we didn’t understand.”

Perelman’s April lecture tour was treated by mathematicians and by the press as a major event. Among the audience at his talk at Princeton were John Ball, Andrew Wiles, John Forbes Nash, Jr., who had proved the Riemannian embedding theorem, and John Conway, the inventor of the cellular automaton game Life. To the astonishment of many in the audience, Perelman said nothing about the Poincaré. “Here is a guy who proved a world-famous theorem and didn’t even mention it,” Frank Quinn, a mathematician at Virginia Tech, said. “He stated some key points and special properties, and then answered questions. He was establishing credibility. If he had beaten his chest and said, ‘I solved it,’ he would have got a huge amount of resistance.” He added, “People were expecting a strange sight. Perelman was much more normal than they expected.”

To Perelman’s disappointment, Hamilton did not attend that lecture or the next ones, at Stony Brook. “I’m a disciple of Hamilton’s, though I haven’t received his authorization,” Perelman told us. But John Morgan, at Columbia, where Hamilton now taught, was in the audience at Stony Brook, and after a lecture he invited Perelman to speak at Columbia. Perelman, hoping to see Hamilton, agreed. The lecture took place on a Saturday morning. Hamilton showed up late and asked no questions during either the long discussion session that followed the talk or the lunch after that. “I had the impression he had read only the first part of my paper,” Perelman said.

In the April 18, 2003, issue of Science, Yau was featured in an article about Perelman’s proof: “Many experts, although not all, seem convinced that Perelman has stubbed out the cigars and tamed the narrow necks. But they are less confident that he can control the number of surgeries. That could prove a fatal flaw, Yau warns, noting that many other attempted proofs of the Poincaré conjecture have stumbled over similar missing steps.” Proofs should be treated with skepticism until mathematicians have had a chance to review them thoroughly, Yau told us. Until then, he said, “it’s not math—it’s religion.”

By mid-July, Perelman had posted the final two installments of his proof on the Internet, and mathematicians had begun the work of formal explication, painstakingly retracing his steps. In the United States, at least two teams of experts had assigned themselves this task: Gang Tian (Yau’s rival) and John Morgan; and a pair of researchers at the University of Michigan. Both projects were supported by the Clay Institute, which planned to publish Tian and Morgan’s work as a book. The book, in addition to providing other mathematicians with a guide to Perelman’s logic, would allow him to be considered for the Clay Institute’s million-dollar prize for solving the Poincaré. (To be eligible, a proof must be published in a peer-reviewed venue and withstand two years of scrutiny by the mathematical community.)

On September 10, 2004, more than a year after Perelman returned to St. Petersburg, he received a long e-mail from Tian, who said that he had just attended a two-week workshop at Princeton devoted to Perelman’s proof. “I think that we have understood the whole paper,” Tian wrote. “It is all right.”

Perelman did not write back. As he explained to us, “I didn’t worry too much myself. This was a famous problem. Some people needed time to get accustomed to the fact that this is no longer a conjecture. I personally decided for myself that it was right for me to stay away from verification and not to participate in all these meetings. It is important for me that I don’t influence this process.”

In July of that year, the National Science Foundation had given nearly a million dollars in grants to Yau, Hamilton, and several students of Yau’s to study and apply Perelman’s “breakthrough.” An entire branch of mathematics had grown up around efforts to solve the Poincaré, and now that branch appeared at risk of becoming obsolete. Michael Freedman, who won a Fields for proving the Poincaré conjecture for the fourth dimension, told the Times that Perelman’s proof was a “small sorrow for this particular branch of topology.” Yuri Burago said, “It kills the field. After this is done, many mathematicians will move to other branches of mathematics.”

Five months later, Chern died, and Yau’s efforts to insure that he-—not Tian—was recognized as his successor turned vicious. “It’s all about their primacy in China and their leadership among the expatriate Chinese,” Joseph Kohn, a former chairman of the Prince-ton mathematics department, said. “Yau’s not jealous of Tian’s mathematics, but he’s jealous of his power back in China.”

Though Yau had not spent more than a few months at a time on mainland China since he was an infant, he was convinced that his status as the only Chinese Fields Medal winner should make him Chern’s successor. In a speech he gave at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, during the summer of 2004, Yau reminded his listeners of his Chinese roots. “When I stepped out from the airplane, I touched the soil of Beijing and felt great joy to be in my mother country,” he said. “I am proud to say that when I was awarded the Fields Medal in mathematics, I held no passport of any country and should certainly be considered Chinese.”

The following summer, Yau returned to China and, in a series of interviews with Chinese reporters, attacked Tian and the mathematicians at Peking University. In an article published in a Beijing science newspaper, which ran under the headline “SHING-TUNG YAU IS SLAMMING ACADEMIC CORRUPTION IN CHINA,” Yau called Tian “a complete mess.” He accused him of holding multiple professorships and of collecting a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for a few months’ work at a Chinese university, while students were living on a hundred dollars a month. He also charged Tian with shoddy scholarship and plagiarism, and with intimidating his graduate students into letting him add his name to their papers. “Since I promoted him all the way to his academic fame today, I should also take responsibility for his improper behavior,” Yau was quoted as saying to a reporter, explaining why he felt obliged to speak out.

In another interview, Yau described how the Fields committee had passed Tian over in 1988 and how he had lobbied on Tian’s behalf with various prize committees, including one at the National Science Foundation, which awarded Tian five hundred thousand dollars in 1994.

Tian was appalled by Yau’s attacks, but he felt that, as Yau’s former student, there was little he could do about them. “His accusations were baseless,” Tian told us. But, he added, “I have deep roots in Chinese culture. A teacher is a teacher. There is respect. It is very hard for me to think of anything to do.”

While Yau was in China, he visited Xi-Ping Zhu, a protégé of his who was now chairman of the mathematics department at Sun Yat-sen University. In the spring of 2003, after Perelman completed his lecture tour in the United States, Yau had recruited Zhu and another student, Huai-Dong Cao, a professor at Lehigh University, to undertake an explication of Perelman’s proof. Zhu and Cao had studied the Ricci flow under Yau, who considered Zhu, in particular, to be a mathematician of exceptional promise. “We have to figure out whether Perelman’s paper holds together,” Yau told them. Yau arranged for Zhu to spend the 2005-06 academic year at Harvard, where he gave a seminar on Perelman’s proof and continued to work on his paper with Cao.

On April 13th of this year, the thirty-one mathematicians on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Mathematics received a brief e-mail from Yau and the journal’s co-editor informing them that they had three days to comment on a paper by Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao titled “The Hamilton-Perelman Theory of Ricci Flow: The Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures,” which Yau planned to publish in the journal. The e-mail did not include a copy of the paper, reports from referees, or an abstract. At least one board member asked to see the paper but was told that it was not available. On April 16th, Cao received a message from Yau telling him that the paper had been accepted by the A.J.M., and an abstract was posted on the journal’s Web site.

A month later, Yau had lunch in Cambridge with Jim Carlson, the president of the Clay Institute. He told Carlson that he wanted to trade a copy of Zhu and Cao’s paper for a copy of Tian and Morgan’s book manuscript. Yau told us he was worried that Tian would try to steal from Zhu and Cao’s work, and he wanted to give each party simultaneous access to what the other had written. “I had a lunch with Carlson to request to exchange both manuscripts to make sure that nobody can copy the other,” Yau said. Carlson demurred, explaining that the Clay Institute had not yet received Tian and Morgan’s complete manuscript.

By the end of the following week, the title of Zhu and Cao’s paper on the A.J.M.’s Web site had changed, to “A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures: Application of the Hamilton-Perelman Theory of the Ricci Flow.” The abstract had also been revised. A new sentence explained, “This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci flow.”

Zhu and Cao’s paper was more than three hundred pages long and filled the A.J.M.’s entire June issue. The bulk of the paper is devoted to reconstructing many of Hamilton’s Ricci-flow results—including results that Perelman had made use of in his proof—and much of Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré. In their introduction, Zhu and Cao credit Perelman with having “brought in fresh new ideas to figure out important steps to overcome the main obstacles that remained in the program of Hamilton.” However, they write, they were obliged to “substitute several key arguments of Perelman by new approaches based on our study, because we were unable to comprehend these original arguments of Perelman which are essential to the completion of the geometrization program.” Mathematicians familiar with Perelman’s proof disputed the idea that Zhu and Cao had contributed significant new approaches to the Poincaré. “Perelman already did it and what he did was complete and correct,” John Morgan said. “I don’t see that they did anything different.”

By early June, Yau had begun to promote the proof publicly. On June 3rd, at his mathematics institute in Beijing, he held a press conference. The acting director of the mathematics institute, attempting to explain the relative contributions of the different mathematicians who had worked on the Poincaré, said, “Hamilton contributed over fifty per cent; the Russian, Perelman, about twenty-five per cent; and the Chinese, Yau, Zhu, and Cao et al., about thirty per cent.” (Evidently, simple addition can sometimes trip up even a mathematician.) Yau added, “Given the significance of the Poincaré, that Chinese mathematicians played a thirty-per-cent role is by no means easy. It is a very important contribution.”

On June 12th, the week before Yau’s conference on string theory opened in Beijing, the South China Morning Post reported, “Mainland mathematicians who helped crack a ‘millennium math problem’ will present the methodology and findings to physicist Stephen Hawking. . . . Yau Shing-Tung, who organized Professor Hawking’s visit and is also Professor Cao’s teacher, said yesterday he would present the findings to Professor Hawking because he believed the knowledge would help his research into the formation of black holes.”

On the morning of his lecture in Beijing, Yau told us, “We want our contribution understood. And this is also a strategy to encourage Zhu, who is in China and who has done really spectacular work. I mean, important work with a century-long problem, which will probably have another few century-long implications. If you can attach your name in any way, it is a contribution.”

E. T. Bell, the author of “Men of Mathematics,” a witty history of the discipline published in 1937, once lamented “the squabbles over priority which disfigure scientific history.” But in the days before e-mail, blogs, and Web sites, a certain decorum usually prevailed. In 1881, Poincaré, who was then at the University of Caen, had an altercation with a German mathematician in Leipzig named Felix Klein. Poincaré had published several papers in which he labelled certain functions “Fuchsian,” after another mathematician. Klein wrote to Poincaré, pointing out that he and others had done significant work on these functions, too. An exchange of polite letters between Leipzig and Caen ensued. Poincaré’s last word on the subject was a quote from Goethe’s “Faust”: “Name ist Schall und Rauch.” Loosely translated, that corresponds to Shakespeare’s “What’s in a name?”

This, essentially, is what Yau’s friends are asking themselves. “I find myself getting annoyed with Yau that he seems to feel the need for more kudos,” Dan Stroock, of M.I.T., said. “This is a guy who did magnificent things, for which he was magnificently rewarded. He won every prize to be won. I find it a little mean of him to seem to be trying to get a share of this as well.” Stroock pointed out that, twenty-five years ago, Yau was in a situation very similar to the one Perelman is in today. His most famous result, on Calabi-Yau manifolds, was hugely important for theoretical physics. “Calabi outlined a program,” Stroock said. “In a real sense, Yau was Calabi’s Perelman. Now he’s on the other side. He’s had no compunction at all in taking the lion’s share of credit for Calabi-Yau. And now he seems to be resenting Perelman getting credit for completing Hamilton’s program. I don’t know if the analogy has ever occurred to him.”

Mathematics, more than many other fields, depends on collaboration. Most problems require the insights of several mathematicians in order to be solved, and the profession has evolved a standard for crediting individual contributions that is as stringent as the rules governing math itself. As Perelman put it, “If everyone is honest, it is natural to share ideas.” Many mathematicians view Yau’s conduct over the Poincaré as a violation of this basic ethic, and worry about the damage it has caused the profession. “Politics, power, and control have no legitimate role in our community, and they threaten the integrity of our field,” Phillip Griffiths said.

Perelman likes to attend opera performances at the Mariinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg. Sitting high up in the back of the house, he can’t make out the singers’ expressions or see the details of their costumes. But he cares only about the sound of their voices, and he says that the acoustics are better where he sits than anywhere else in the theatre. Perelman views the mathematics community—and much of the larger world—from a similar remove.

Before we arrived in St. Petersburg, on June 23rd, we had sent several messages to his e-mail address at the Steklov Institute, hoping to arrange a meeting, but he had not replied. We took a taxi to his apartment building and, reluctant to intrude on his privacy, left a book—a collection of John Nash’s papers—in his mailbox, along with a card saying that we would be sitting on a bench in a nearby playground the following afternoon. The next day, after Perelman failed to appear, we left a box of pearl tea and a note describing some of the questions we hoped to discuss with him. We repeated this ritual a third time. Finally, believing that Perelman was out of town, we pressed the buzzer for his apartment, hoping at least to speak with his mother. A woman answered and let us inside. Perelman met us in the dimly lit hallway of the apartment. It turned out that he had not checked his Steklov e-mail address for months, and had not looked in his mailbox all week. He had no idea who we were.

We arranged to meet at ten the following morning on Nevsky Prospekt. From there, Perelman, dressed in a sports coat and loafers, took us on a four-hour walking tour of the city, commenting on every building and vista. After that, we all went to a vocal competition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which lasted for five hours. Perelman repeatedly said that he had retired from the mathematics community and no longer considered himself a professional mathematician. He mentioned a dispute that he had had years earlier with a collaborator over how to credit the author of a particular proof, and said that he was dismayed by the discipline’s lax ethics. “It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens,” he said. “It is people like me who are isolated.” We asked him whether he had read Cao and Zhu’s paper. “It is not clear to me what new contribution did they make,” he said. “Apparently, Zhu did not quite understand the argument and reworked it.” As for Yau, Perelman said, “I can’t say I’m outraged. Other people do worse. Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.”

The prospect of being awarded a Fields Medal had forced him to make a complete break with his profession. “As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice,” Perelman explained. “Either to make some ugly thing”—a fuss about the math community’s lack of integrity—“or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.” We asked Perelman whether, by refusing the Fields and withdrawing from his profession, he was eliminating any possibility of influencing the discipline. “I am not a politician!” he replied, angrily. Perelman would not say whether his objection to awards extended to the Clay Institute’s million-dollar prize. “I’m not going to decide whether to accept the prize until it is offered,” he said.

Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman’s logic: “To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.” Others might view Perelman’s refusal to accept a Fields as arrogant, Gromov said, but his principles are admirable. “The ideal scientist does science and cares about nothing else,” he said. “He wants to live this ideal. Now, I don’t think he really lives on this ideal plane. But he wants to.”

9月4号

到了实验室，和宝宝聊了一阵电话之后，中午12点，出发，踏上购物征程。

边走边照，到了宫城县政府所在地附近的勾当台公园，被一阵喧闹的声音所吸引，又是在上周同样的位置，又在演出，内容似乎是日本的传统节目；虽是烈日高照，还是有大约五六百人端坐在场地中央，看得精精有味，周围阴凉处更是站满了人，想凑近一些拍照，结果被一维持秩序的人阻止，摇着头连说NO。没办法，只好不拍，演出的场地后，有好多小摊位，展示的是所谓街头艺术，以绘画为主，维妙维肖，很是吸引眼球，一阵狂拍。这时看到远处一女孩拿一长焦镜头的相机似乎在拍演出，突然想到S3 IS的48倍长焦拍摄功能，一试。嘿，果然成功，只用了光学变焦，还没用数字变焦，就已经把舞台上的情况看得一清二楚，于是赶紧偷拍，哼哼。

马路的东边是一处广场，有几座雕塑，不少小孩在喂鸽子，很是可爱。最吸引我的是广场正中的一座雕塑，似乎是母亲抱着孩子，走近，底座上大书两字“和平”，此时此地，看到这个词，不由慨叹万千。

打开地图，准备先去东北大的片平校区，追寻鲁迅当年的足迹，走着走着，居然发现走进了中央大街，百思不得其解：怎么走这来了。路中央有一群外国人在表演乐器，又唱又跳，很是惹眼；前行百余步，居然发现一辆F1赛车停在路边供人参观，呵呵，这可是第一次近距离看F1，估计是日本某车队的。在这条大街上走了一会，发现并不是中央大街，而是广濑宏大街的购物步行街，走了一阵，买了些点心，两瓶小酒，也算是有收获；而且也发现了转向中央大街的入口。于是买啊买，背了一大包东西，手还提着两样，走回会馆，那可真叫累，倒下便睡。

还好定了闹钟，六点二十把我吵醒了，MIKI开着她家长的车，车上还有另外一个女生，叫Kora，是她小学同学，和她很要好，来接我，那个来自Bolivia的男生还在做实验，于是我们先去超市买东西。日本车的车载设施很齐全，MIKI这辆丰田上最吸引我的是方向盘左方的一屏幕，结果是车载GPS定位系统，车一开动屏幕上能很清楚地显示车辆所在道路以及道路两边的交通信息，非常直观；据MIKI说能显示全日本的路况信息，这样即使在外地也不会迷失方向了。而这个屏幕同时能接收电视信号，能收八个频道，呵呵，比我在宾馆里的电视机接收的频道还要多两个^_^屏幕的第三个功能就是在倒车时能即时成象车后的情况，非常直观。这一套系统在中国似乎还未使用，而在日本早已是非常普及，两国在技术上，以及技术应用上的差距，sigh，真不知该说什么好了。

Bolivia男生做完了实验，我们一行四人去了一家MILKY WAY的饭馆聊天，在车上MIKI就告诉我此男会四国语言，特别幽默，是她见宗的最幽默的男生。见面果不其然，他是第一次和Kora见面，却装出一幅和她很熟的样子，如果是不知情的人肯定认为他们是老朋友了，呵呵；此Bolivia男还教我们说了几句spanish，搞笑非常。我看他这么幽默，猜他肯定有女朋友的，一问，此人答曰：yes。哪想到过了没两分钟，一本正经地告诉我说，和她女朋友break up了，搞得我连声sorry，他却又很大度地摇头，笑着说：It doesn’t matter. Not hear broken.真是好玩。此君特擅长肢体动作，两只手挥来挥去，活象一只monkey，用中国的话说，真是个活宝，呵呵。

9月1号

到9月了，早上到研究室刚打开信箱，发现订购相机的网站又给我发了一封信，粘进google翻译，大意好象是发货了，并且提供了一个送货商的货号和网址链接，到这个链接，输入货号，回车，吃了一惊：

早上的时候只有前两栏，提示从东京发货时间和到达仙台店的时间，信息之准确透明让我慨叹，于是知道下午肯定能够拿到相机和SD卡。果不其然，在我要求的送货时间14:00-16:00之间，在14：35，MIKI告诉我送相机的人来了。手续很简单，付帐，拿货，甚至不需要签字，我事先准备的印章更是显得无用了。下一栏应该是送货人回到店里之后登录上去的。

送货之事虽小，却对我震憾颇大，在信息发布上，国内政府和企业都还有相当漫长的路要走。

临近晚饭时间，拿到了图书馆的卡和研究室的钥匙，这样我明后天也能在研究室上网了，呵呵，今天打电话没找到老婆，明天也能补上^_^

8月31日

明天就九月了，而且是周五。日子真如流水飞快。

发现最近变得好有礼貌，见人已经习惯点头哈腰了，包括刚才在电梯里。呼呼。

来的时候看到东北大学医学部的考试通知，才想起来，就是九月三号呗；如果按照我最初的想法，我现在已经是在做入学考试的准备了。

中午收到邮件，通知我相机已经发货了，不出意外明天应该能够收到，呵呵，高兴。

下午参加了研究室的Seminar。坐定，Horii教授说了一番话，我环顾四周，大家都到齐了，共13人，职工有3人，学生9人，一人是产科的。不注意间，Horii教授突然叫我起来自我介绍，还好MIKI中午的时候提醒我准备一下，于是把那几句最常见的日语说了出来，教授还说我讲得很标准，呼呼，他哪知道我只会这几句。介绍完毕，接下来就正式开始Seminar，事后得知是每周一次，频率可真高。首先由小川和美介绍了她最近的工作，貌似是作乳酸菌和头颈部肿瘤的关系。接下来是一篇文献讲述，不象国内，就介绍了一篇新宿大学教授发表的文章，IF也不高，不象我们，总是找Nautre，Science上的文章来讲。然后就是每人一页幻灯片的工作报告，量少，但却实实在在地，这一点比我们强，一月一次频率太低，值得借鉴。

呵呵，到了九月，就可以很快见到宝宝了。好想她。

回到会馆，还是打开电视，又是电视购物，换台，发现一个类似幸运五十二的节目，引起我注意的倒不是这个节目办得有多好，而是屏幕上的一道选择题，大意是宫本晋三和福坦这两个政治家的谁的血型是B型，居然会出这种题，真无语了…

8月25日

今天是本周工作的最后一天，也是来日本的第一个星期。明后天准备去看看仙台的大小店铺，看有合适的东西采购回国没有。

来仙台的五天过得平静而舒适。没有课题的压力，日子过得清闲不少。今天也不例外，在办公室里坐了一天，主要是上网查资料，上午查了美国医学前五学校的招生情况，下午在水木上看了看国内的就业形式和已工作人士们的讨论。时间过得很快。还差点忘记了宝宝约好上网的事，赶紧打开QQ，还好老婆在，聊了好久。真的好想她。想早点回国去。

我所经过的这个红绿灯位于仙台的一条主要干道上，很有特点，不知是否能代表日本的红绿灯。不象中国，红绿是相隔一段时间交替出现，好让行人通行，这个红绿灯只有在有行人按按钮的时候才会变绿，会让行车方便不少；但同时也存在如果接连有行人按按钮的话，行车也是颇为麻烦。

回到房间，仍然是习惯性打开电视，一阵乱按之后，惊异地发现某台在演机器猫，呵呵，虽说是鸟语，不过还是看完了，连猜带鼓，算是我在日本看的第一个电视节目吧。

8月26日

周六。十点半出门，逛街去。

沿路向东，走得数十米向北即是东北大学附属病院，再向北眺望竟能看见不远处山峰，难怪石尺说仙台就三条主要的街道，其中也包括东北大学的这一条。不慌不忙地向前走，路过一家便利店，无甚东西要买，纯属好奇，呵呵，就进去瞎转一圈出来，看着路人匆匆的脚步，我可真是悠闲。

看地图算比例，从住处到仙台车站不过两公里多一点，还有些怀疑我的计算是否错误，不过走了一段路，便发现仙台真是个小地方，呵呵。边走边看风景，不到半小时就到了宫城县政府所在地，日本的地域划分和中国不同，县比市要大，仙台市只是宫城县里的一部分，为政府所在地。政府大楼旁边一幢十层高楼上贴一横幅，大意是要讨回被俄国占领的北方四岛，看来日本民众还是很关心北方的争端领土。之后又缓行20分钟，来到我当日的出站处，进得三楼，很容易找到S-PAL，发现进门的第一家店就有药品卖，店主很热情地帮忙找到了外用庤疮药，还介绍了两家卖资生堂的店给我，行事风格和国内真是大相径庭。下二楼，找到卖资生堂的店，看着那么多化妆品，一阵晕，服务员又不会英语，最后好不容易讨得一本资生堂的介绍手册，带回会馆慢慢研究先。开始寻找大家口中的yodobasi camera，绕了个小圈后才发现所在，过天桥横穿铁轨，意外发现旁边有家挺大的药局，有三层小楼。想起小静姐姐告知的话，果真在药局里也发现资生堂和kose的化妆品，同时也有痔疮的药卖，相比之下似乎比S-PAL里卖得要便宜许多，呵呵，一阵高兴，想不到我也有找买便宜东西的天赋嘛。从药局出来，旁边一不显眼二层小楼上挂了些sony，canon等的广告，心想不会这就是那个仙台最大的电器店吧，黄同学给我说的是有四五层楼高啊。走近一看，费劲地读出日语假名，还真就是那个yodobasi，当时便ft要死，两层楼卖什么东西啊，而且第二层ms还有家用电器卖，进去转了一圈，还真是这样，一层主要为较现代电器，包括手机、相机、笔记本等，归类挺好。真令我晕倒的果然是卖场太小，比camera为例，就一处，产品放一起，收银台在一处，共约不到100平米吧，一问价格，还贵得很，我想要的powershot S3 IS kakaku上卖41,000，他这却是卖到49,000，好象还不含税，帮范京川问了他的摄象机，也是较网上价格高出不少。半个小时不到，一楼逛毕，郁闷，虽知二楼卖的是家用电器，不死心，上楼，果然还是，电视啊，手表等，十五分钟下楼。终于明白当时来接我师姐在车上所说，仙台就是个农村。此话今天验证一番，还真是不假，估计就比江津大一些，ft。郁闷之时，却发现了去东京的夜间巴士乘车处，6,100日元，比新干线便宜近4,000块，早上五点15到达东京。拿了份时刻表出来，正碰上一堆人排队上车，去山形。ms巴士条件还行，乘车人中有不少老人，可以考虑乘巴士去东京，时间上倒合适。

电器购物受打击不少，准备回会馆。误打误撞，却进入了我觉得可能是仙台最繁华的一条大街，叫做Clis Road（中央大街），日本的车站颇为和中国不同，车站周边往往是人气旺盛之地，东京如此，仙台也如此。我从1:30开始逛这条大街，万万没想到直至约4:00才始出得此街，也创了自己个人逛街的时间纪录了。

此中央大街实为中国的步行街，由东向西，其间由两条干道从中阻断，分为三段。看到一家药局，颇大，进去一逛，发现ms东西比yodobasi旁边那家更为便宜，心中一喜，便开始钻研起来，其实对化妆品一窍不通，再加之斗大的日文不认识几个，真是头疼，不过得借此行购物，只得坚持下来。熟悉了一家，又进第二家，如此反复，下午一共进了五六家类似的店，看了一堆资生堂等的产品，头晕。乃至我发现好象又进了同一家店时，才觉察到自己竟然稀里糊涂地往回走了不少路，难怪刚才惊叹如此一条步行街上竟有两家麦当荣，其实乃为一家，真是ft。买了些小化妆品，还有眼药水等。仙台的物价是要便宜些，小静姐姐买得资生堂美白用了1,200块，我在一家店看到只要900元即可。看来货比三家的确是句至理名言啊。买东西的时候特别注意了是否是made in Japan，不过始终有疏漏，给老婆买了个Disney的Mickey Mouse，觉得特可爱，也未细究，回会馆一看还真居然就是made in China，呵呵，还好没多买，虽说也不贵。看到好些地方卖个叫enamel removal的东东，不知为何物，还好没买，回来一查结果是去牙齿釉质的，呵呵，下次再去的时候务必要带上文曲星。

逛得又累又饿，终于往回走了。途经县政府旁边的市民广场，人声鼎沸，望去好不热闹。凑去一瞧，还是两出人马在搞活动，一处好象是学生在宣传农业作物无农药生产，很多学生在里面，还有不少市民从他们那买“绿色大米”，朝他们的募捐箱里投硬币。另一处是演出，不知是否是学生组织，叫作24 hour television 29，台上两人在rock的伴奏下不停摇滚着身体，颇类似欧美风格。

回到会馆，累得直接躺在床上。却不由想，师姐说仙台位于日本东北，相当于中国的欠发达地区；仙台如此地方，居然有能在日本排名第四的大学，而且该大学还资助中国学生前往交流，其领导人物的办学气魄和思路非常人能及。

8月27日

又到了27号。今天是和老婆一起五年零六个月的日子。时间过得飞快，都这么久了。18号是我们在一起的1999天，宝宝曾问我第9999天的时候我会怎么对她，真是傻得可爱，只会比现在更为爱她。

看了经济学中关于市场效率和平等的一个章节，不由慨叹：当年高度集中的社会主义经济体制违反了基本十大经济学原理中的好几条，难怪苏联最终在经济上崩溃；幸好中国意识到这一点，及时扭转了方向，以市场为主导，辅以政府调控。幸甚幸甚。

晚上正看书，忽有人敲门，纳闷，谁会来找我呢？开门一看，原来是刘师兄（石尺）和周师姐夫妇，给我送些水果来。真是感激不已，他们真是好人。

8月23号

今天无甚特别，只是中午吃方便面的时候忘记了放火腿肠，搞得下午很早就饿了，还好晚上吃饱了补足^_^

晚会后穿过红绿灯，正待进会馆，突然想四处走走，于是背着电脑，小走了一圈。周围私人开的医院很多，眼科、胃肠科。才七点钟，很多商店就已经打烊关门。先进了一家卖酒店，有不少各类，一瓶日本清酒约130元人民币，可以带几瓶回国。后来进了一家卖小装饰品店，店面很小，十平米左右，店主很热情地用日语打招呼，我一脸窘样，呵呵，他也明白了，不过还是很热情地介绍这介绍那。走的时候终于用日语说了“谢谢”。

转回会馆，洗毕，躺在床上。回想在仙台的这三天，对旅居海外学子的思乡之前有了深刻的理解。我才来短短几天，头两天在东京有小静姐姐相陪，处处汉语，不觉得有什么。待我真正一人独处，那思念之情真是才下眉头，却上心头。到处都是异国的语言文字，身边的朋友很少，不知道该如何娱乐。庆幸拷了3部电影来，其中一部还是机器猫，真是ft。现在不敢看，等哪天实在憋得慌的时候再看吧，估计这次来日本又可以把大话西游看上几遍了。研究室的人很忙，到现在也没看他们做实验，一天到晚就坐在Horri先生外面的房间里，很是不便，用skype打电话还得趁他不在的时候；还好MIKI会说英语，要不一天就不会说几句话，现在开口就是英语，呵呵，回国后英语口语肯定会提高很多。

开电视，关电视；开电脑…写下一天的感受，接下来便是学习日语，经济学。一天一天，好盼到周末，可以出去逛逛，不过又怕周末，不能上网打电话…

看了一课日语，真累，翻看去年五一的照片，和宝宝爬泰山、游青岛，真幸福。好想我的宝宝。好想早点回去…

到了11点，本该继续看书；忽觉乏味无比，打开《射雕英雄传》，一晃而过，阅毕抬头一看，近两点了，赶紧睡觉。

8月22日   

    八点半起床，到得研究室已是九点，很幸运，MIKI告诉我教授出外办事。于是我便安心地打开电脑上上网，因为昨晚已经感觉系统有些问题，便趁上午的当儿重装了系统。装毕已是中午时分，午饭时间，接着回会馆睡觉。过马路时，已是绿灯，对面的老太太停住脚步不走，正纳闷，才听到警笛声，这时我已在路中央，加紧脚步走到对面，警车/消防车呼啸而过。不过这次的感觉和在国内看警车闯红灯完全不同，后来得知此时必有紧急任务，可以穿越红灯。

下午和MIKI聊了会天，机器猫、柯南，在日本是大受欢迎，令她很惊讶的是中国人也喜欢这两部漫画；她告诉我她喜欢三国志，那个古老的年代，呵呵，看来普通日本人对中国的文化亦是兴致勃勃。

仙台离海不远，外面风声不断，空气里夹杂着湿润的气息。MIKI告诉我一年到头仙台都会刮风，不过这种类似的海风比起北京春天的狂风来好了许多。

和东京一样，仙台的街道也颇窄，两条车道，一来一往，再加上两边的人行横道，感觉和重庆差不多，看惯了北京宽阔的大街还颇为不习惯。房间的窗户正对着马路，是仙台的一条主要干道，可不论早上、中午还是晚上行人都很少，估计大家都开车吧，呵呵，满街的丰田、本田和三菱。

下午试用了skype，通话质量相当不错，以后就可以多给家里和老婆打电话了。真好。

开了电视，马上又关了，全是日语不说，屏幕上全是日本人的动作、笑脸…文化之间的鸿沟如此之大，还好拷了两部电影过来，要不可就惨了，不过才过两天，留到关键时刻才看吧。Sigh。

   今天是在日本的第四个晚上，终于有时间写写自己的感受了

8月18日

早早醒来，打的，转地铁，再打的，六点零五分到了机场。

海关就是走过场。怀着忐忑的心情去检票，担心行李超重，一称20.4kg，没事，高兴；却同时被告知飞机晚点近四个小时。一下有点郁闷了，心里暗暗骂着该死的恐怖分子。安检比以前严格了些，电脑包扫了两遍，不过也还算顺利。出境审查排了一阵队，用了二十分钟左右，不过也还好。到了登机口，七点过十分，找了个靠电视的位置坐下，开始漫长的等待过程。

中午1点15，离开北京；旁边坐了个巴基，会说英语，和他聊了一阵，呵呵，他可是信仰伊斯兰教的家伙哦^_^。飞机飞进浡海，接着进入韩国领空，向下望，农田连绵，感觉和在飞机上看中国差不多，没区别。

下午六点15到了成田机场，降落还算顺利。看着窗外的景色，绿色葱葱，算是对日本的第一印象吧。从卫星岛到主楼，坐类似地铁的穿梭车，第一次感觉了日本的轨道交通。接着出机场，和旁边的巴基比，中国人不用健康登记，有了优越感，呵呵。在出境处，那个女工作员可真仔细，看证件，询问，还让我详细写地址，足足用了十分钟，日本人办事可真认真啊。在机场大厅等了一小时左右，见到了小静姐姐，比照片上漂亮。巴士已经没有了，转了两次电车，到了小静姐姐的家，一个叫小岩站的地方。进得房间，发现的确如小静姐姐事前所说，很小，约20平米，不过功能却划分得很齐全，客厅兼卧室，厨房，卫生间，真是麻雀虽小，五脏俱全。沙发拉出来做床，我睡；小静姐姐拉出垫子来，睡地板上，已经是一个标准日本人的生活习惯了。

8月19日

睁开惺松的睡醒，小静姐姐已经起来了；早餐完毕，我们便出发。目的地是银座，乘JR线很快便到了，东京的地下车站就是一个小型的生活空间，什么都有，和中国的车站在功能上有着本质的不同。上得地面，面对满目的日文广告牌，才发现自己已经置身于日本最繁华的地段，显得有些不知所措。姐姐带我去看三越百货，虽是周末，三越里的人却也不多，和国内繁华的大商场截然不同。午饭在一家日本料理店吃的，品尝了日本地道的生鱼片，和想象中的感觉完全不同，很担心是否能吃惯，出乎意料，觉得很是爽口，一点也没有生涩的感觉。

接下去松下电工东京总部，参观了松下的未来体验式住房，住房依据人性化设计原理，采用了很多先进的技术，与之对比，国内的住房真是落后多年。中国的总GDP十年内超过日本，这是毫无疑问，但制造装备、高新技术却还有很长的路要走，sigh。

东京湾，很美很美，一点没有国内海滩脏乱的样子，坐上渡船，迎风体验湿润的空气，海鸥在天空盘旋，东京湾大桥划出一道优美的弧线，横跨大海…下了电车，到了一家东京最有名的温泉盛地。日本人称泡温泉为汤，真是颇为有些有趣。进了男汤，学着别人的模样，穿上日本的简易和服，走进幕府时代一条街，街上满是古日本的东西，还有在演当时的戏剧，甚是逼真。“汤”是由好些浴池组成，取有不同的名字，猜想可能是其中温泉的矿物质成分不同所致。晚饭时分透过玻璃遥望东京湾，闪闪灯光点缀下，甚是迷人。

回到小静姐姐家，听小静姐姐说在日本的往事，聊到三点半，告诉了我好多人生的经验。好佩服这个坚强的女子，愈挫愈勇，对生活始终充满了热爱和希望；对比自己，真是自愧不如。

8月20日

时间真是过得飞快，已经是在东京的最后半天了。

目的地是新宿，东京的高层建筑汇聚地。

上了45层楼高的东京知事府大楼，东京景色一览无余，零星的几幢大楼间散步着无数的二三层小楼，和想象中的东京高楼大厦遍布差距不小。即便在寸土寸金的东京，日本民众仍然没有放弃自己的生活方式，一生的工作就为这样的一幢小楼，真是让人嗟叹不已。

和小静姐姐道别的时间很快来临，揣着新干线的车票来到“子弹头”车前，无人检票，大家自觉排队礼让，秩序井然。列车准时出发，出得东京，时速骤提，身边景物穿梭而过，一个半小时便抵仙台。

接我的有三人：刘姓师兄，在中国长大的日本人，后来得知其父是在哈尔滨的日本遗孤；一周姓师姐，大连人，其夫人；另一谷姓师姐，为实验室师姐。到得会馆，放下行囊便去见Horri先生，和国内教授不同，Horri先生待人和蔼随意，无教授之架势，简单对话几句，叫刘姓师兄带我参观研究室。晚餐由刘师兄所请，为仙台著名的烤牛舌，颇为鲜嫩；四人盘膝而座，听师兄师姐介绍良多情况。饭后刘师兄开车和周师姐一起，带我去了附近的一家超市，告诉了我一些买东西的情况。

回到会馆住处，一间约十平米小屋，设施倒齐全，卫生间占了一半的面积，足见日本人之注重洗浴^_^穿上简易和服，收拾完毕，面对全是日本台的电视，无语。赶紧拿出Horri先生给的文献，准备第二天的交谈。

8月21日

Horri教授要上一天课，约好12点见面，故多睡了一会。10点，接到服务台的电话，从零星的英语单词中猜测大概是要来打扫卫生，赶紧起来。打扫卫生的是两个年纪较长的服务员，一进来就连声说对不起，打搅我休息。本以为一个人五分钟之内就能打扫完毕的清洁，两位却整整做了十五分钟，那认真劲，比我整理自己的东西还认真负责，负责打扫卫生间的阿姨更是擦了又擦，生怕落下哪一点地方，让我汗颜不已，却也为之肃然起劲，打扫卫生尚且如此，真是一个可怕的民族。

到了研究室，Horri先生还没回来，他的秘书一个叫MIKI的日本女孩，很热情地接待了我，MIKI英语说得还行，和我聊起了日本的风土人情和中国的逸闻趣事，被文老师说中了，MIKI对我和宝宝的大头照尤为感兴趣，问这问那。

Horri先生介绍了副教授福重给我，福重教授从事的领域是我以前未涉猎过的，于是给了我一篇文献，于是我便开始阅读。一会来了一个马来西亚的华裔女孩，中文说得很好，暂充当起了我的翻译，方便交流了很多。

下午领了奖学金，见了负责留学生事务的Ono教授， 都非常迅速，日本人的办事效率的确很高。刘师兄还带我去了食堂，给我介绍了一下。晚餐花费不高，346日元，消费是比东京便宜许多^_^