l***o
发帖数: 7937 | 1 哥伦比亚大学很差进！
http://www.albany.edu/~scifraud/data/sci_fraud_4236.html
Columbia's attorneys are battling a similar complaint brought by a former
Columbia mathematics student, Sheng-Ming Ma, against former mathematics
department chair Duong Phong. In a complaint filed in March 1998 in the New
York Supreme Court for New York City, Ma claims Phong took a math proof he
had done as a thesis project and published it as his own in a paper co-
authored with Elias Stein of Princeton University. Phong has denied the
allegation in a response to the suit.
Ma's complaint alleges that Phong s assigned Ma a problem for his thesis on
a mathematical topic involving oscillatory integrals and that he finished a
proof in 1995. Phong first rejected the work as flawed' Ma's brief says, but
encouraged the student to continue and even suggested that the two might co
-author a paper. Later, in March 1997, Ma says, Phong told him the
manuscript was "totally wrong" and urged him to focus on another topic.
Ma claims that he sent his draft to other mathematicians for advice. One of
them, Stein, gave him a "terrible shock," Ma says: Stein wanted to know why
Ma was working on a problem that he and Phong had recently solved and were
planning to publish in Acta Mathematical Stunned at first, Ma says, he soon
accused Phong and Stein of plagiarizing his work. Ma acknowledges that his
work was not completely original: Phong and Stein had been working on this
topic since 1991. But Ma claims that Phong had set this specific problem
aside by the time his thesis work began.
Ma sought help from Columbia administrators and others to stop publication
of the paper. But few could understand the text, and nearly all the
mathematicians Ma contacted sided with Phong. They told Ma that his thesis
work was inadequate, and that he was wrong to claim that the Phong-Stein
paper, which Acta Mathematica published in November 1997, was plagiarized.
At Ma's insistence, graduate school dean Eduardo Macagno looked into the
case, reviewing comments by Phong, Stein, two other Columbia mathematicians,
and a Harvard mathematician. Macagno concluded that no plagiarism had
occurred. The math department told Ma that he would have to apologize to
Phong before he would get a new mentor and that without a mentor, he would
have to leave. Ma refused, and Columbia dismissed him in 1997. For a time,
Ma says, he worked at a Subway sandwich shop. But, with two master's degrees
in math from Columbia, he found a computer-related job. He filed suit in
1998. Mathematician Lawrence Alan Shepp of Rutgers University in New
Brunswick, New Jersey, is supporting Ma's case but says others must judge
whether Ma's work is correct.
Phong declined to comment. Stein says that Ma's argument is "without merit."
It was Ma who used his professor's ideas, Stein says, not the other way
around: Ma's "got it upside down." He recalls that Phong tried to get Ma to
work on a different and difficult subset of the problem the two professors
were working on, but that Ma, making no progress, decided to try to
duplicate their efforts.
Columbia is asking to have the suit dismissed because it claims to have made
a "diligent,complete, and unbiased" investigation before rejecting the
complaint. The university also argues that Ma is trying to involve the court
in ‘purely academic decisions" which New York has "repeatedly held to be
beyond judicial review." Finally, the university suggests that mathematical
principles cannot be plagiarized in any case because they "simply cannot be
copyrighted."
If the case does go to trial, it could create , a unique problem: The judge,
and possibly a jury, might be asked to rule in a few days on who
contributed what to a complex scientific proof - the kind of controversy
that can a take years to resolve among mathematicians. | H**r
发帖数: 10015 | 2 中国人都这么苦逼啊
话说打subway工要绿卡吧 |
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