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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Pag-Asa Replies
By Antonio C. Abaya Written Oct. 16, 2006 For the Standard Today, October 17 issue In reaction to my article Pag-Asa is Hope? (Oct. 02), the Philippine Atmospheric, Geographical and Astronomical Services or PAG-ASA, through its Deputy Director for Operations and Services, Prisco D. Nilo, wrote back in a two-page, single-spaced letter defending itself. �Our expectation is that this entire letter will be published soon either in the front page or editorial section of your newspaper to vindicate our reputation to your readers,� etc I regret that I cannot guarantee that as that is the prerogative of the editor-in-chief, to whom you sent a copy of your letter. I am not even sure if your letter will appear in the OpEd section on the same day as this particular column, as I had requested. But the letter will appear in full in our website www.tapatt.org, together with the emailed letters of those who reacted to Pag-Asa is Hope? PAG-ASA: �We cannot understand how you can consider the foreign media more credible than PAGASA in forecasting Typhoon Milenyo (international name Xangsane) when you yourself verified that their foreign meteorological sources predicted Milenyo would skirt Luzon its way North to Japan as of Wednesday Sept. 27, 2006 .� How Sir is that information more timely and accurate than PAGASA�s official forecast that Milenyo was heading for the NCR including Metro Manila and the surrounding provinces, as it actually did. As early as Sept. 25 we issued advisories and bulletins for Milenyo from its inception as a low pressure are until it became a full-blown typhoon and even called an emergency press conference in the afternoon on Sept. 27 to recommend early suspension of classes on all levels including government offices (except of course for our weather forecasters and all disaster coordinating agencies, even your own newspaper, the Manila Standard Today printed that announcement on its front page�..� MY REPLY. My original article clearly stated that �the weather forecasters of CNN and the BBC were tracking and projecting the path of Milenyo�as it skirted the Luzon mainland on its way northward to Japan�..Sometime between midnight and 8:00 am the next day, while we (and that included me) were asleep, Milenyo apparently veered west-northwestward��� There is nothing unusual about this. Typhoons and other weather disturbances are known to unexpectedly change their paths. That is why, if I recall correctly, they were given female names in the past, before the era of feminism and political correctness changed all that. If PAGASA was indeed able to detect the change of path of Milenyo before the weather forecasters of CNN, the BBC and the US Navy did, then bully for PAG-ASA. But PAG-ASA does not have a cable TV outlet that the TV-viewing public can watch. At any rate, most of us were as asleep when Milenyo changed its path and headed for the NCR. Clearly, not the fault of PAG-ASA that most of the public were caught unawares. I never put blame for that on PAG-ASA. PAG-ASA: �In your column you also inferred that PAG-ASA underestimated the strength of Milenyo�s winds. It should be emphasized that PAGASA and the weather centers in Japan , China , Vietnam and other members of the Typhoon Committee uses 10-minute sustained winds as compared to the 1-minute sustained winds used by the US . We have to multiply by 0.70 the 1-minute sustained to obtain the 10-minute sustained, in truth the 140 kph sustained wind, with gustiness of up to 160 kph in our forecasts are capable of the extensive destruction like toppled trees, billboards powerlines and the unroofing of many light structures. It is not surprising that your side view mirrors went flying, especially if Milenyo�s winds are coming from behind or to the sides of your vehicles, side mirrors are aerodynamically sloping to withstand incoming wind flow from the front but not from the side or back, in which case it would act like an air scoop. If you experienced 10-minute sustained winds of 240 kph in the extreme to catastrophic range, you would have lost more than your car�s side mirror, you could have lost your whole car�.� MY REPLY. The exact words of my article were: �I doubt if a mere 140 kph wind could have done what it did at the Fort, but a 140 mph wind, or something close to it, could have, and did�.� PAG-ASA: �You may be skeptical, but our anemometers give the most accurate verification for actual surface level wind speeds of passing tropical cyclones. PAGASA also has access to data from weather satellites, although these have good remote sensing applications, it is less accurate in determining surface level atmospheric conditions like wind speed��.� MY REPLY. Because CNN, the BBC and the US Navy put the wind speeds of Milenyo at 237-240 kph, while PAG-ASA put the same at 120-140 kph, my article asked: �Are PAG-ASA�s anemometers perhaps calibrated in mph, but someone misread the data in kph? 140 mph, after all, is equivalent to 233 kph �.� This is a valid question, which Deputy Director Nilo ignored and did not answer directly. Several of my readers share the same suspicion, including Rafael Alunan III, former Secretary of the Interior and Local Government, a European business expat resident in Paranaque , and a former European ambassador to this country. PAG-ASA: ��.We wish to inform you that Jesuit scientist founded the meteorological services in the Philippines . We trace our history to the earliest typhoon forecasting service in Asia founded in 1865, you can even see it in our logo, so who says religion and science are incompatible? �.The decision to rename the former Philippine Weather Bureau as the PAGASA was accomplished though both an act of Congress�and PD 78 signed into law by President Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1972, in recognition of the great contribution of our services to the nation at a time when the country was faced by a series of devastating weather related disasters. The renaming of a government office is not a matter that should be done lightly for any frivolous reason, if you feel strongly about it you may suggest the proper bill to Congress�.� MY REPLY. I am aware that a Jesuit, the venerable Padre Faura, founded the antecedent of the Weather Bureau and PAG-ASA. I attended four years of high school at the Ateneo de Manila campus on Padre Faura Street in Ermita, literally in the shadow of Padre Faura�s Manila Observatory, destroyed by the Americans in the Battle for the Liberation of Manila in February 1945. And I never said that science and religion are incompatible. As long as each discipline confines itself to its purview - religion to dispense Hope in Life Everlasting, science to observe and explain natural phenomena - there is no conflict between the two. And I know that changing the name (and acronym) of a government office needs a bill in Congress. I was just thinking out loud that an agency dealing with hard scientific data should not be associated with Hope of any kind, even in its acronym.***** Reactions to [email protected]. Other articles since 2001 in www.tapatt.org OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �Pag-asa Replies� Dear Mr. Abaya, We would like to inform you that as a policy PAGASA gladly welcomes astute criticism as a challenge to improve our vital services. If however our competence is inadvertently called into question based on misinformation we are obliged to correct this to the public immediately. Such is the case of your column titled �PAGASA is Hope (?)� which came out last Oct. 3, 2006, we would like the opportunity to set the record straight on some issues in your commentary as per the following facts: � We cannot understand how you can consider the foreign media more credible than PAGASA in forecasting Typhoon Milenyo (international name Xangsane), when you yourself verified that their foreign meteorological sources predicted Milenyo would skirt Luzon on its way North to Japan as of Wednesday Sept. 27, 2006 .� How Sir is that information more timely and accurate than PAGASA�s official forecast that Milenyo was heading for the NCR including Metro Manila and the surrounding provinces, as it actually did? As early as September 25 we issued advisories and bulletins for Milenyo from its inception as a low pressure area until it became a full blown typhoon and even called an emergency press conference in the afternoon on September 27 to recommend the early suspension of classes on all levels including government offices (except of course for our weather forecasters and all disaster coordinating agencies), even your own newspaper the Manila Standard Today printed that announcement on its front page. We knew Milenyo would track low across Luzon , in fact when it exited the Philippine Area of Responsibility it continued on a westerly direction until it made landfall near Hue , Vietnam on Oct. 1. So as you can plainly see it did not head North much less reach Japan as the others had predicted. � In your column you also inferred that PAGASA underestimated the strength of Milenyo�s winds. It should be emphasized that PAGASA and the weather centers in Japan , China , Vietnam and other members of the Typhoon Committee uses 10-minute sustained winds as compared to the 1-minute sustained winds used by the U.S. . We have to multiply by 0.70 the 1-minute sustained wind to obtain the 10-minute sustained wind, in truth the 140 kph sustained winds with gustiness of up to 160 kph in our forecasts are capable of the extensive destruction like toppled trees, billboards powerlines and the un-roofing of many light structures. It is not surprising that your side view mirrors went flying, especially if Milenyo�s winds are coming up from behind or to the sides of your vehicles, side mirrors are aerodynamically sloping to withstand incoming wind flow from the front but not from the side or back, in which case it would act like an air scoop. If you experienced 10-minute sustained winds of 240 kph in the extreme to catastrophic range, you would have lost more than your car�s side mirror, you could have lost your whole car. � You may be skeptical, but our anemometers give the most accurate verification for actual surface level wind speeds of passing tropical cyclones. PAGASA also has access to data from weather satellites, although these have good remote sensing applications, it is less accurate in determining surface level atmospheric conditions like wind speed. A spy satellite illustrates a good comparison since it is similar to a weather satellite, it can monitor a wide area like the City of Moscow, but it is too far away to see a particular person in front of the Kremlin building, a passing spy plane can see a crowd of people standing in front of the Kremlin, but only an agent in the field can pick out one person standing in front of the Kremlin to read from the same newspaper he is holding. With that argument, our anemometers in the field stations are like our trained agents at the Kremlin, they were close enough to know the actual surface level wind speed during the passage of Typhoon Milenyo. � And lastly as to your suggestion that our agency be renamed BEWARE or Bureau of Eruptions, Weather, Astronomical Records and Earthquakes, because you think the acronym PAGASA is more suited for a religious organization, we wish to inform you that Jesuit scientist founded the meteorological services in the Philippines. We trace our history to the earliest typhoon forecasting service in Asia founded in 1865, you can even see it on our logo, so who says religion and science are incompatible? Besides the PHIVOLCS would also object to your proposal since it is the official government earthquake and volcanic eruption agency. The decision to rename the former Philippine Weather Bureau as the PAGASA was accomplished through both an act of Congress (Cong. Malasarte Bill) and PD 78 signed into law by President Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1972, in recognition of the great contributions of our services to the nation at a time when the country was faced by a series of devastating weather related disasters. The renaming of a government office is not a matter that should be done lightly for any frivolous reason, if you feel strongly about it you may suggest the proper bill to Congress. May the above information be helpful in convincing you to reconsider your previous position on the accuracy of our forecast and expertise of our weather forecasters and of course the correctness of our agency�s name wherein you ask �PAGASA is hope (?)�, in answer we reply that when it comes to typhoons, you can be assured that it is. Our expectation is that this entire letter will be published soon either in the front page or editorial section of your newspaper to vindicate our reputation to your readers. PRISCO D. NILO, Oct. 06, 2006 (Deputy Director for Operations & Services) Officer in Charge, PAGASA wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww PAG-ASA "sayangtis" needs more training. Weather forecasting is a very important part of our daily life. Before I leave home I think twice ... "Do I have to bring an umbrella today or maybe not?". Business and the economy depend on better weather forecasting method. Businessmen travel, supplies and raw materials are being shipped, constructions and services industry need to plan their task and last but not the least ... do I have to call sick today or just work from home?. I grew up with PAGASA guiding me the weather. Some were accurate but most of the time the opposite. Pagasa staff must update their skills. The country is depending on them but their weather forecasting most of the time were apparently inaccurate. Pagasa 'sayangtis" must set aside using their horoscope foretelling skills. Nonoy Ramos, Oct. 19, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww I recall, in High School, many typhoons ago, arguing that our then Weather Bureau was always 100% in its weather forecasting and thus must be the most accurate in the world. How did I arrive at that conclusion? Just listen: �Cloudy to cloudy skies with occasional showers and thunderstorms , etc, etc . . .� They can�t be wrong. Sinabi ng lahat ng possibilities! But even without Tessie Tomas of PAG ASA- A, in fairness, I think PAGASA today is still doing a good job. We(a)ther we like it or not, rain or shine, come hell or high waters, mayroon tayong PAGASA. (sabi nga ni Erap weder-weder lang �yan.) MABUHAY! Edhardo J. Tria Tirona, Oct. 19, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww "Habang may buhay, may PAG-ASA." Pierre Tierra, Oct. 19, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Tony, I do not know if PAGASA is equipped with the latest tools in weather forecasting including the use of Doppler Radar other than the use of sensors or thermoters. If they are, then the probability that their forecast will happen will assist all government agencies and private sector in evacuating people and saving lives. Dr. Nestor P. Baylan, [email protected], New York City, Oct. 19, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Tony, I just arrived in Manila via PAL in the morning before Milenyo devastated Manila and its surroundings. In Makati , where I usually stay, it was pitiful to see some of the stately, aging acacias were up-rooted by the strong winds of Milenyo. Milenyo, a typhoon? I don't think so. Not with the strength of its winds that shattered glass windows and brought down metallic billboards, not to mention the destruction of hundreds of trees lined along the fairways of Wack Wack, Riviera, Southwoods and other golf courses in Manila, Rizal, Cavite and other southern provinces. Ganny Cornelio, [email protected], , Oct. 19, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww THEY ARE MIFFED BUT PROTEST TOO MUCH. I WONDER IF THE WRITER EXPERIENCED YOLING FIRST HAND. I WAS OUT THERE IN THE OPEN AT EDSA FOR TWO HOURS IN THE MIDDLE OF A TRAFFIC JAM, FROM THE ORTIGAS INTERSECTION ALL THE WAY TO BUENDIA, THEN TO MAKATI AVE FOR ANOTHER HOUR UNDER THE CANOPY OF RIZAL THEATRE WATCHING YOLING'S FURY SMASH THE WINDOWS OF THE INTERCON. THE EYE OF YOLING PASSED OVERHEAD WHILE I WAS ON TOP OF GUADALUPE BRIDGE . THE SECOND PART OF THE TYPHOON, USUALLY THE STRONGER ONE, HIT OUR CARS FULL FORCE FRONTALLY AS WE CRESTED THE RISE AFTER THE SEMINARY. NEON SIGNS, TREES, BILLBOARDS, G.I. SHEETS AND TREES WERE FLYING OR TOPPLING. PERHAPS SOME VEHICLES DID BUT I DIDN'T SEE ONE ON THAT STRETCH. IN ANY CASE YOLING WAS OVER 200KPH AND THE STRENGTH OF MILENYO APPROXIMATED THAT. I40KPH WAS THE STRENGTH OF DADING OR THEREABOUTS WHICH ALSO TOPPLED TREES BUT NOT THE SAME MAGNITUDE OF DESTRUCTION THAT MILENYO WROUGHT. MERALCO CHAIR MANOLO LOPEZ TOLD ME THAT MILENYO, BASED ON MERALCO'S LONG-EXPERIENCE, WAS AS DAMAGING IF NOT MORE THAN YOLING. A 140KPH TYPHOON WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DAMAGE SO MUCH OF MERALCO'S INFRA AS MILENYO DID. I CERTAINLY AGREE. YOLING WAS SOME 35 YEARS AGO AND THE TERRIFYING EXPERIENCE OF THE THOUSANDS OTHERS WHO WERE CAUGHT OUT IN THE OPEN ENABLED ME TO MAKE A FIRST HAND COMPARISON. I DONT NEED INSTRUMENTS TO DO THAT. SPEAKING OF INSTRUMENTS, PAGASA SHOULD MAKE PUBLIC WHETHER THEIR HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE (INCLUDING HUMAN RESOURCES) ARE UP TO THE JOB IN THIS MODERN AGE AND ADEQUATELY SO. THE WRITER'S THEORETICAL AND PROCEDURAL EXPLANATION FALLS SHORT OF ANSWERS TO THE QUESTION - WAS MILENYO ACTUALLY IN EXCESS OF 200KPH AS THE US NAVY WEATHER CENTER SAID IT WAS? IF SO, THEN THE NEXT QUESTION THAT SHOULD BE ANSWERED IS - DID PAG-ASA'S INSTRUMENTS ERR OR WAS IT A HUMAN ERROR? Rafael Alunan III, [email protected], Oct. 19, 2006 Former Secretary of the Interior and Local Government wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww TONY, I FULLY AGREE WITH YOU- I WAS CLOCKING MILENYO CLOSELY (unfortunately I did not save the data) PAGASA WAS VERY SLOW TO REACT. WHEN I ADVISED MY CHILDREN/OTHER REALTIVES/FRIENDS AND WARNED THEM ABOUT THE SEVERITY OF THE TYPHOON, NO ONE WAS AWARE ! THANKS, ERNIE Ernesto Aboitiz, [email protected], Oct. 19, 2006 Former Secretary of Energy wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Good for you. I enjoyed your rebuttal. This is only my own opinion, Whoever coined the acronym �Pag-asa� either had foresight or was in a satirical mood. Maria P. Almeda, [email protected], Oct. 19, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww If it's any consolation, a well-known British weather forecaster, Michael Fish is on record as saying, way back in 1987, " I've had an email from a lady saying there's a hurricane coming towards us from the Atlantic, but we have nothing to worry about." Shortly afterwards Britain was hit by the biggest typhoon of the last century ! Weather is strange and tricky. Liz Davies, [email protected], Alabang, Oct. 19, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Bravo, Tony. It is only lately that PAGASA started to come near accurate forecasts (but then again...)! I still remember when storm signal warnings were given a minute too late, when all of us were already in, or on the way to, school that classes were suspended. There were even times when classes were suspended but there was only a drizzle, nothing more than a short rain. I was in Laguna when Milenyo struck, and the way it swept almost all the trees lining the SLEX and in almost all other areas, it would be improbable that a 140 kph wind would be enough to do such. Not even the previous 185-195 kph storms did as much damage in areas that were struck. For PAGASA to remain credible, it should sit down and list what went wrong and also check the calibration of their facilities (satellite data included). Perhaps some of their meters were installed by Padre Faura himself. Felipe Rommel Martinez, [email protected], Oct. 19, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Tony: Pag-Asa deserves full credit for replying to your column, and trying its best to straighten things out regarding Typhoon Milenyo. Many agencies of government normally would not have taken the trouble at all. It is evident that Pag-Asa is not one of them. You and The Standard deserve full credit as well. In good faith you pointed out what in your judgment you considered to be certain discrepancies in Pag-Asa's reporting. That is what the public expects of a free, knowledgeable, fair and objective press. Mariano Patalinjug, [email protected], Yonkers, New York, Oct. 19, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Tony, I am glad that you published PAG ASA�s side. This is a very professional way of treating issues. PAG ASA�s work is tough. Predicting the path of typhoons is never easy as these natural forces veer from their computed path from time to time. Please use your prestigious position to lobby for more equipment for PAG ASA. They need more radars to accurately detect the emergence of weather disturbances and accurately compute their path. You are in the media business, please use your expertise, connections, influence to help disseminate PAG-ASA�s findings. You wrote about cable tv outlet probably you can organize this from your end as a civic duty. You know more about information dissemination than us and we hope you can do something to help the nation on this field. Through your space we like to extend our sincere gratitude and appreciation for these civil servants in PAG ASA who work beyond their call of duty just to help protect lives and property. Kudos to Dr. Prisco D. Nilo and his team. To our heroes, thank you very much and keep up the good work. Apolonio Anota, [email protected], Singapore, Oct. 20, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww You know what? I myself did not like your article. It sounded like it had a sense of antagonism. Sorry, but that�s my honest opinion. Good luck. Genny Ferrer, [email protected], Oct. 21, 2006 Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Hello Tony, Now that you got their ear, we hope it will affect their toes. This might save lives if they keep on it. (their toes, I mean.). Adolfo Canete, [email protected], Davao City , Oct. 22, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww (The following article was emailed to us) The Emperor of Math By Dennis Overbye Oct. 17, 2006, The New York Times Correction Appended In 1979, Shing-Tung Yau, then a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was visiting China and asked the authorities for permission to visit his birthplace, Shantou, a mountain town in Guangdong Province. At first they refused, saying the town was not on the map. Finally, after more delays and excuses, Dr. Yau found himself being driven on a fresh dirt road through farm fields to his hometown, where the citizens slaughtered a cow to celebrate his homecoming. Only long after he left did Dr. Yau learn that the road had been built for his visit. �I was truly amazed,� Dr. Yau said recently, smiling sheepishly. �I feel guilty that this happened.� He was standing in the airy frosted-glass light of his office in the Morningside Center of Mathematics, one of three math institutes he has founded in China . For nine months of the year, Dr. Yau is a Harvard math professor, best known for inventing the mathematical structures known as Calabi-Yau spaces that underlie string theory, the supposed �theory of everything.� In 1982 he won a Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Dr. Yau can be found holding court in the Yenching restaurant in Harvard Square or off the math library in his cramped office, where the blackboard is covered with equations and sketches of artfully chopped-up doughnuts. But the other three months he is what his friend Andrew Strominger, a Harvard physicist, called �the emperor ascendant of Chinese science,� one of the most prominent of the �overseas Chinese� who return home every summer to work, teach, lobby, inspire and feud like warlords in an effort to advance world-class science in China. David J. Gross, the Nobel physicist and string theorist who directs the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara , called Dr. Yau �a transitional figure, between emperor and democrat.� Dr. Yau�s story is a window into the dynamics that prevail in China as 5,000 years of Middle Kingdom tradition tries to mix with postmodern science, a blending that, if it takes, could eventually reshape the balance of science and technology in the world. �In China he is a movie star,� said Ronnie Chan, a Hong Kong real estate developer and an old friend who helped bankroll the Morningside Center . And last summer Dr. Yau played the part, dashing in black cars from television studios to V.I.P. receptions in forbidden gardens in the Forbidden City . He ushered Stephen Hawking into the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square to kick off a meeting of some of the world�s leading physicists on string theory, and beamed as a poem he had written was performed by a music professor on the conference stage. It reads in part: �Beautiful indeed/is the source of truth./To measure the changes of time and space/the smartest are nothing.� Dr. Yau does not buy the emperor bit. Where, he protested recently, is his empire if he holds no political position and two of his most brilliant recent students are currently without jobs? �It�s just a perception as far as I can tell,� he said. Certainly, his life is not all roses. In the last year alone Dr. Yau has been engaged in a very public fight with Beijing University , having accused it of corruption, and a New Yorker magazine article portrayed him as trying to horn in on credit for solving the Poincar� conjecture, a famous 100-year-old problem about the structure of space. Everybody agrees that Dr. Yau is one of the great mathematicians of the age. �Yau really is a genius,� said Robert Greene, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles . �The quantity and quality of the math he has done is overpowering.� But even his admirers say he has a political side. �As Shiing-Shen Chern�s successor as emperor of Chinese mathematics,� Deane Yang, a professor of mathematics at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn and an old family friend, wrote in a letter to The New Yorker, �Yau has an outsized ego and great ambition, and has done things that dismay his peers.� But, Dr. Yang said, Dr. Yau has been a major force for good in mathematics and in China , a prodigious teacher who has trained 39 Ph.D.�s. Richard Hamilton, a friend of Dr. Yau and a mathematician at Columbia, said Dr. Yau had built �an assembly of talent, not an empire of people, people attracted by his energy, his brilliant ideas and his unflagging support for first-rate mathematics, people whom Yau has brought together to work on the hardest problems.� A Barefoot Boy That Shing-Tung Yau, born in 1949, had such potential was not always obvious. His family fled the mainland and the Communist takeover when he was a baby. As one of eight children of a college professor and a librarian, growing up poor without electricity or running water in a village outside Hong Kong , he was the leader of a street gang and often skipped school. But talks with his father instilled in him a love of literature and philosophy and, he learned when he started studying math, a taste for abstract thinking. �In fact, I felt I can understand my father�s conversations better after I learned geometry,� he said at a talk in 2003. When he was 14, his father died, leaving the family destitute and in debt. To assuage his pain, the young Mr. Yau retreated into his studies. To help out financially, he worked as a tutor. At the Chinese University of Hong Kong , Mr. Yau emerged as a precocious mathematician, leaving after only three years, with no degree, for graduate school at the University of California , Berkeley . Mr. Yau took six courses his first semester there, leaving scant time for lunch. By the end of his first year he had collaborated with a teacher to prove conjectures about the geometry of unusually warped spaces. He also came under the wing of Dr. Chern, then widely recognized as the greatest living Chinese-born mathematician, who told Mr. Yau he had already done enough work to write a doctoral thesis. Dr. Yau was in Berkeley during the wildest years of the antiwar movement. He did not participate, but he was already political. He and his friends demonstrated at the Taiwan Consulate General in San Francisco to protest Japanese incursions on Chinese territory. �Maybe we envied our American colleagues and took after them,� Dr. Yau said. In 1971, at age 22, Dr. Yau took his new Ph.D. to the Institute for Advanced Study, then to the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Stanford, where he arrived in 1973 in time for a conference on geometry and general relativity � Einstein�s theory that ascribes gravity to warped space-time geometry. At the conference, Dr. Yau had a brainstorm, realizing he could disprove a longstanding conjecture by the University of Pennsylvania professor Eugenio Calabi that the dimensions of space could be curled up like the loops in a carpet. Dr. Yau set to work on a paper. But two months later he got a letter from Dr. Calabi and realized there was a gap in his reasoning. �I couldn�t sleep,� Dr. Yau recalled. After agonizing for two weeks, he concluded that the opposite was true: the Calabi conjecture was right. His proof of that, published in 1976, made him a star. His paper would also lay part of the foundation 10 years later for string theory, showing how most of the 10 dimensions of space-time required by the �theory of everything� could be rolled up out of sight in what are now called Calabi-Yau spaces. Three years later, Dr. Yau proved another important result about Einstein�s theory of general relativity: any solution to Einstein�s equations must have positive energy. Otherwise, said Dr. Strominger, the Harvard physicist, space-time would be unstable � �you could have perpetual motion.� The result is that Dr. Yau has lived a crossover life. As a pure mathematician, he is �a major figure, perhaps the major figure,� as Michael Anderson of SUNY Stony Brook called him, in building up differential geometry, the study of curves and surfaces. Dr. Hamilton, the Columbia mathematician, said Dr. Yau liked to be in the center of things, unlike others who liked to retreat into a corner and think. �He seems to thrive on being bombarded with all this information,� he said. He is also an honorary physicist, using �his muscular style,� in the words of Brian Greene, a Columbia string theorist who worked with Dr. Yau as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, to smash equations and get the physics out of them. �He corners equations like a lion after its prey,� Dr. Greene said, �then he seals all the exits.� Prizes and honors flowed Dr. Yau�s way after the Calabi triumph, including the Fields Medal, a MacArthur �genius� grant in 1985 and a National Medal of Science in 1997. He became a United States citizen in 1990. (He said he put away the money from the MacArthur grant for his two children�s college education.) A Wandering Son Returns Dr. Yau married Yu Yun, an applied physicist from Taiwan , in 1976. At one point, when his family had preceded him on a move to San Diego , an institute colleague, Demetrios Christodoulou, noticed that Dr. Yau would pick up the phone late every night and start singing into it in Chinese. �Yau is full of surprises, I thought to myself, now he wants to become a great opera singer,� Dr. Christodoulou recalled in an e-mail message. �As I later found out, these songs were lullabies for his children.� It was natural that as Dr. Yau�s star rose, his �mother country,� as he put it, sought to pull him into its orbit. When he made his first trip back to China , in 1979, Dr. Yau became one of several returning heroes. A century of unhappy encounters with the West had left China with a deep sense of scientific and technological inferiority. Dr. Yau has devoted himself to building up Chinese mathematics and promoting basic research, arranging for Chinese students to come to the United States , donating money and books, and tapping rich friends to found mathematics institutes in Hong Kong , Beijing and Hangzhou . He even lived in Taiwan in the early 1990�s so his children would learn Chinese. In his travels he became friendly with President Jiang Zemin, then the leader of the Communist Party, who impressed him as �a smart guy.� The impression was mutual. When Mr. Jiang recited the first line of a Chinese poem at a dinner honoring intellectuals, Dr. Yau showed off his learning by reciting back the entire poem. In 2004, Dr. Yau was honored at the Great Hall of the People for his contributions to Chinese mathematics. In a speech he said that when he won the Fields Medal, �I held no passport of any country and should certainly be considered Chinese.� That same year Dr. Chern died at 93. Dr. Strominger recalled a newspaper headline declaring that with Chern�s death, �the era of Yau� was about to begin. It has not been a peaceful era. For the last year Dr. Yau has carried on a campaign against Beijing University , accusing it of committing fraud by padding its faculty with big names from overseas and paying them lucrative salaries for a few months of work. A survey in Science magazine showed that the number of such part-time professors in China had grown to 89 from 6 over the last six years, while the number of full-time professors had risen to 101 from 66. The arrangement allows Chinese universities to piggyback on the glory of work these people do in their other jobs. Dr. Yau said it also drains resources that should go to young researchers. This summer, Beijing University redesignated some overseas scholars to part time from full time. All this has taken a toll. �Yau is not universally loved,� said Mr. Chan, the real estate developer. �He has paid a price.� Dr. Yau agreed. �I am completely outspoken. And I do offend people,� he said, adding that his style was to be intensely critical, both of his students and of his colleagues� ideas. Confrontations in China go all the way to the top, because all the money comes from the government, Dr. Yau said. �The only reason I have the nerve to resist,� he said, �is I�m a Harvard professor. I don�t draw a penny from China .� �If I didn�t have the Fields Medal,� he added, �I would be dead to them.� A Messy Proof Dr. Yau�s eagerness to help China can backfire, and that seems to have happened in the case of the Poincar� conjecture. The conjecture, first set forth by Henri Poincar� in 1905, may be the most famous problem in mathematics and forms part of the foundation for topology, which deals with shapes. It says essentially that anything without holes is equivalent to a sphere. In 1982, Dr. Hamilton of Columbia devised a method, known as the Ricci flow, to investigate the shapes of spaces. Dr. Yau was enthusiastic that this method might finally crack the Poincar� conjecture. He began working with Dr. Hamilton and urging others to work on it, with little success. Then, in 2003, a Russian mathematician, Grigory Perelman, sketched a way to jump a roadblock that had stymied Dr. Hamilton and to prove the hallowed theorem as well as a more general one proposed by the Cornell mathematician William Thurston. Dr. Perelman promptly disappeared, leaving his colleagues to connect the dots. Among those who took up that challenge, at the urging of Dr. Yau, were Huai-Dong Cao of Lehigh University, a former student, and Xi-Ping Zhu of Zhongshan University . Last June, Dr. Yau announced that they had succeeded and that the first complete proof would appear in The Asian Journal of Mathematics, at which he is the chief editor. In a speech later that month during the string theory conference, Dr. Yau said, �In Perelman�s work, many key ideas of the proofs are sketched or outlined, but complete details of the proofs are often missing,� adding that the Cao-Zhu paper had filled some of these in with new arguments. This annoyed many mathematicians, who felt that Dr. Yau had slighted Dr. Perelman. Other teams who were finishing their own connect-the-dots proofs said they had found no gaps in Dr. Perelman�s work. �There was no mystery they suddenly resolved,� said John Morgan of Columbia , who was working with Gang Tian of Princeton on a proof. In August, Dr. Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal at a meeting of the International Mathematical Union in Madrid , but he declined to accept it. A week later a drawing in The New Yorker showed Dr. Yau trying to grab the Fields Medal from the neck of Dr. Perelman. On his Web site, doctoryau.com, Dr. Yau has posted a 12-page letter showing what he and his lawyer say are errors in the article. The New Yorker has said it stands by its reporting. �My name is damaged in China ,� Dr. Yau said. �I have to fix my reputation in China in order to help younger students.� He denied that he had ever said there were gaps in Dr. Perelman�s work. �I said it is not understood by all people,� he said. �That is why it takes three more years.� As a �leading geometer,� Dr. Yau said he had a duty to dig out the truth of the proof. Dr. Hamilton said, �In any long new work, it�s hard to figure out what�s going on.� It was natural, he said, that Dr. Yau would want people who had experience in the esoteric field of Ricci flow to check the proof. Asked if promoting the Cao-Zhu paper so loudly had been a mistake, Dr. Yau said that even a small contribution to such a great achievement as proving the Poincar� conjecture would live in the history of science. In addition, he said he wanted to encourage Dr. Zhu, who he said had been neglected by the Chinese establishment. Dr. Yau acknowledged that he also felt a duty to help explain Dr. Hamilton�s work. In a twist, a flaw has been discovered in the Cao-Zhu paper. One of the arguments that the authors used to fill in Dr. Perelman�s proof is identical to one posted on the Internet in June 2003 by Bruce Kleiner, of Yale, and John Lott, of the University of Michigan, who had been trying to explicate Dr. Perelman�s work. In an erratum to run in The Asian Journal of Mathematics, Dr. Cao and Dr. Zhu acknowledge the mistake, saying they had forgotten that they studied and incorporated that material into their notes three years ago. In an e-mail message, Dr. Yau said the incident was �unfortunate� but reaffirmed his decision to expedite the paper�s publication. �Even after the correction, the paper provides many important new details and clarifications of Hamilton and Perelman�s proof of the Poincar� and Thurston conjectures.� Many mathematicians are dismayed that the Poincar� triumph has become mired in a fight about credit and personalities. �In spite of the rivalries,� Dr. Hamilton said, �we are deeply dependent on each other�s work. None of us is working in a vacuum.� About the Poincar� proof, he said, �I�ve never seen Yau say that Perelman hadn�t done it.� No one, he added, had been more responsible than Dr. Yau for creating the Ricci flow program that won Dr. Perelman his prize. Dr. Morgan said he still regarded Dr. Yau as his friend. �He has done tremendous things for math,� he said. �He�s a great figure. He�s Shakespearean, larger than life. His virtues are larger than life, and his vices are larger than life.� Dr. Yau said the Poincar� conjecture was bigger than any prize and beyond politics. �I work on mathematics because of its great beauty,� he said. �History will judge this work, not a committee.� Correction: Oct. 21, 2006 A picture caption in Science Times on Tuesday with an article about the mathematician Shing-Tung Yau misstated the location of Zhejiang University, where Dr. Yau took part in a 2002 conference with the physicist Stephen Hawking. It is in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province � not Beijing. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww (The following article was emailed to us.): Can We Still Feed the World? By Henrylito D. Tacio Can we feed a population, still increasing by 75 million yearly, without wrecking the only planet we have? That question, asked by environment correspondent Alex Kirby in one of the segments of the six-part "Planet Under Pressure" series of the British Broadcasting Corporation, needs to be answered. Now and before it's too late! Despite the bumper crop of grains and increasing meat production, more and more people are going to sleep at night without eating at all. Worldwide, nearly two billion people suffer from hunger and chronic nutrient deficiencies, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization points out. "An empty stomach is not a good political adviser," Albert Einstein once said. "No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach," William Cowper agreed. "No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses," Nikolai Lenin added. "Undoubtedly, the desire for food has been, and still is, one of the main causes of great political events," Bertrand Russell declared. The reason: "A hungry man is not a free man," said Adlai Stevenson. "Seventy percent of the world's hunger live in rural areas, where agriculture either puts food in stomachs directly or, through employment in flourishing agricultural and food processing sector, puts money to buy food into people's pockets," said the Rome-based FAO in a statement. Where people cannot afford to buy enough food, timeless problems like water shortages continue to be the main causes of hunger. Around the globe, 434 million people face water scarcity, and by 2025 between 2.6 billion and 3.1 billion people will be living in either water-stressed or water-scarce conditions, warns the UN Population Fund. Currently, agriculture uses about 70 percent of all the water extracted from Earth's rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers. "As water for agriculture becomes less available, nations become more dependent on expensive food imports," notes the Worldwatch Institute in Washington , D.C. More than 80 percent of arable land worldwide has lost productivity because of soil degradation. Thanks to erosion. "The loss of topsoil reduces the inherent productivity of land, both through the loss of nutrients and degradation of the physical structure," explained Lester R. Brown and Edward C. Wolf, the men behind 'Soil Erosion: Quiet Crisis in the World Economy.' "It also increases the costs of food production." The two authors explained: "When farmers lose topsoil, they may increase land productivity by substituting energy in the form of fertilizer. Hence, farmers losing topsoil may experience either a loss in land productivity or a rise in costs of agricultural inputs. And if productivity drops too low or agricultural costs rise too high, farmers are forced to abandon their land." Harold R. Watson, recipient of the 1985 Ramon Magsaysay Award for international understanding, once deplored: "Soil erosion is an enemy to any nation far worse than any outside enemy coming into a country and conquering it because it is an enemy you cannot see vividly. It's a slow creeping enemy that soon possesses the land." FAO estimates 25 billion tons of soil being washed into the rivers each year. In drier countries, topsoil is being blown away. In the Philippines , abut 200,000 hectares of one-meter deep topsoil are lost yearly due to erosion. All in all, the world is losing an equivalent of five to seven million hectares of farmland each year (equivalent to the land area of Belgium and the Netherlands combined). "The alternative," if the problem is not corrected, "is famine," FAO said. Reasons abound why topsoil is going down. "Although the processes are different, there is a common factor in all man-made soil erosion the absence of vegetation to hold and cover the soil," explained FAO's F.J. Dent. In simpler term: deforestation. In thickly-populated Asia , the forest area declined by over 10 million hectares each year during the 1990s. Nine countries saw a loss of more than one percent over the decade. The Philippines is a case in point: In 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan first sighted the country, forest covered about 90 percent of the total land area. Today, only about 7 percent of the original lowland forest remains. "The situation today is the direct result of the non-implementation of (government) policies and the corruption of former administrations," noted the 'Decline of the Philippine Forest,' published by the Environmental Science for Social Change, Inc. "Deforestation did not just happen," the book added. "It came about as a result of choices made by government, choices that in effect turned control of the forests over to a small group of people and sustained the marginalization of millions of people." When he was still alive, Dr Dioscoro L. Umali lamented: "We subsidized developed countries with cheap timber. Rough estimates indicate that exports reached to over US$6 billion. Much of that income was salted abroad. It never benefited those who live in forest communities." 'The State of the World 2006' reports that half or more of the land in nearly one third of 106 primary watersheds around the world has been converted to agriculture or urban-industrial uses. An estimated 25-50 percent of the world's original wetlands area has been drained for agriculture or other purposes. One of the targets of the first Millennium Development Goal is to reduce hunger and extreme poverty by half by 2015. This is easier said than done. "A better-fed world still finds that hunger and malnutrition extinguish one life every five seconds," bemoans veteran journalist Juan Mercado. "The daily head count for hunger victims is 25,000. Yearly, that adds up to more than two Singapores ." In 1966, politicians from all over the world committed themselves to promote public and private investments in agriculture as a contribution to the goal of reducing hunger. But despite the need, world agriculture is struggling, starved of much-needed investment. "Over the past 20 years, (foreign aid foreign aid for agriculture and rural development) has fallen dramatically from over US$9 billion per year in the early 1980s to less than US$5 billion in the late 1990s," FAO reports. "And yet, an estimated 854 million people around the world remain undernourished." According to FAO, only investment in agriculture together with support for education and health will turn this situation around. "Agriculture may have become a minor player in many industrialized economies, but it must play a starring role on the world stage if we are to bring down the curtain on hunger," it said. Many studies have shown how agricultural growth reduces poverty and hunger. For example, the only group of countries to reduce hunger during the 1990s was the group in which the agriculture sector grew. FAO, looking back at the figures for the last 30 years, found that "those countries that have invested and continue to invest most in agriculture now experience the lowest levels of undernourishment." Worldwatch's Brian Halweil contends: "Most people go hungry not because of a global shortage of food but because they are too poor to buy food or to get the land, water, and other resources needed to produce it. Hunger now kills more than five million children each year roughly one child every five seconds." That's a tragedy. "It is a lot easier emotionally to handle the fact that millions of people are starving if we don't see them as individuals," Stan Mooneyham once commented. -- ### OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |