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Excellent! Here comes the splendid opportunity for me to present my best written answer on Quora, one in which I have put tremendous enthusiasm and energy to compose it!This is a true story about a man who:Dedicated 7 consecutive years of his life to fulfilling a childhood dream that he had held onto for 30 years.During those 7 years, he worked in complete secrecy and isolation to solve the most difficult problem in the history of mathematics. He was preoccupied with one and only one problem. He was confronted by seemingly insuperable intellectual challenges, experienced numerous bouts of self-doubts about the chance of success, with no one by his side to encourage him. He wandered in the uncharted territories of mind-bending world of abstract mathematics and logic. He often spent days, weeks, months, or even years before making significant breakthroughs.After 7 years, he emerged victorious from his mathematical battle. He unveiled his brainchild to an audience of fellow mathematicians. They were astonished to see that the most difficult mathematical puzzle had been solved. Everyone was jubilant and heartily praised him for his achievement. Overnight, he became a celebrity.Except, the jubilation was short-lived because in the process of scrutinizing his work, a slight problem was discerned. However, the more he examined it, the more he appreciated just how fundamental the error was and that it could destroy his work completely.In the 14 months that followed, inspired by the specter of the loss of his reputation and failure, he worked frantically to fix save his brainchild, in near isolation, amidst ridicule and the pressure to release his work. His endeavor hit dead ends after dead ends. Then just as he was about to resign to failure, one ephemeral moment of brilliant insight brought victory to him. His brainchild was saved and became the crowning achievement of the 20th century.To the readers, my answer will not only present an awesome inspirational story about extreme willpower and discipline, but will also do justice to one of the greatest intellectual achievements in history AND serve as a tribute to a brilliant man whose intellect and achievements I deeply admire!This is my intellectual hero Sir Andrew John Wiles - a distinguished and brilliant British mathematician who rose to international fame for his proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture which was also the proof of the famous Fermat’s Last Theorem, a deceptively simple mathematical problem that had confounded the best mathematical minds since it was posed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637.The proof of Taniyama-Shimura conjecture constitutes one of the highest achievements of the human mind, and the intellectual endeavor through which it was created is so indescribably beautiful that only an in-depth account can show how awe-inspiring and significant they are. I will do my best to present the whole story together with all the technicalities in an accessible manner with my understanding of the subject. I am hoping to infuse the readers with the mixture of excitement, frustration, misgiving, fear, and jubilation that Sir Andrew John Wiles experienced in his quest for the proof of the most difficult problem in mathematics.LET THE STORY BEGIN!!!!!!Part 1: The Joyous Discovery, the Beginning of a Childhood Dream and a Lifelong ObsessionBorn in 1953, the young and mathematically inclined Andrew John Wiles loved to frequent the local library in his hometown of Cambridge, Great Britain. In 1963, in a usual visit to the local library, Andrew John Wiles discovered a book entitled The Last Problem by Eric Temple Bell. The book concerns the so-called Fermat’s Last Theorem created by Pierre de Fermat in 1637 described as follows:Prove that there are no integer number solutions [math](x,y,z)[/math] to this equation[math]x^n+y^n=z^n[/math] for [math]n \in N [/math]and [math]n >2[/math]A very simple problem isn’t it? Many people can understand it. But the simplicity of the problem belies the enormous difficulty inherent in it, because for over 300 years, nobody, including the best mathematicians, had succeeded in solving it. Thirty years after reading Eric Bell’s book, Sir Andrew John Wiles still vividly recalled the excitement he had when he alighted on the problem:It looked so simple, and yet all the great mathematicians in history couldn’t solve it. Here was a problem that I, a ten-year-old, could understand and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it.And thus was the seed for the quest to solve the most difficult problem in mathematics planted. He was only 10 years old at that time.The 10-year-old Andrew John Wiles smiling brightly :)Undaunted by the awareness that the most brilliant minds in mathematics had failed to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, young Andrew J. Wiles immediately set about proving the problem using all the techniques he had learned in books. He nourished the dream of succeeding where others had failed and he held on to this dream for years.But in 1975, he had to put aside his dream when he was working as a graduate student for Professor John Coates who believed that it would be a much better use of his brilliant student’s time and talent to work on mainstream, more relevant mathematics. Prof. John Coates remarked:At that stage there was no question of any research student starting work directly on Fermat’s Last Theorem. It was too difficult even for a thoroughly experienced mathematician.To prepare his promising student for joining the ranks of professional mathematicians, John Coates advised him to forget his childhood dream in favor of more mainstream math. He suggested that Andrew J. Wiles studied elliptic equations. Little did professor John Coates know, he was helping Andrew J. Wiles build a solid foundation of knowledge that would enable him to achieve his childhood dream.Already as a graduate student at Cambridge University, Andrew John Wiles demonstrated immense talent as a research mathematician, as evidenced by his advisor’s remark:I remember a colleague told me that he had a very good student who was just finishing part III of the mathematical tripos, and he urged me to take him as a student. I was very fortunate to have Andrew as a student. Even as a research student, he had very deep ideas and it was always clear that he was a mathematician who would do great things.Prof. John Coates’s prophetic words would be vindicated years after they were made.Meanwhile, in the 1970s, the most ambitious scheme in mathematics was capturing the attention of mathematicians around the world and it was inspired by an astounding discovery made by two Japanese mathematicians in 1955.Part 2: The Taniyama-Shimura ConjectureIn 1954, Goro Shimura, a talented mathematician at the University of Tokyo was seeking a journal to help him with an esoteric calculation. He found out that the journal had been borrowed by a fellow mathematician, Yutaka Taniyama. Through written communication, they both realized that they had been working on the same problem. Taniyama suggested that they both worked together to solve the problem. This chance encounter forged an intellectual companionship that would change the course of mathematics in a totally unexpected manner.In September 1955, an international mathematical symposium was held in Tokyo. It was in this occasion that Taniyama presented an extraordinary discovery that was to have a lasting impact on mathematics. In the course of studying modular forms and elliptic equation, he noticed that:the M-series that defined a particular modular form could be matched perfectly to an E-series that defined an elliptic equation.As he examined more modular forms and elliptic equations, he found more and more instances of perfect matching between the E-series of elliptic equations and M-series of modular forms. This suggested to him that there might exist a hidden and fundamental relationship between modular forms and elliptic equations. In layman term, this relationship can be described as:Each modular form is an elliptic equation in disguiseAnd this was the question Taniyama posed to mathematicians at the symposium.This was an astounding hypothesis; and like many ideas that were unprecedented, the hypothesis was so ahead of its time that mathematicians were initially incredulous and skeptical of it. Sure, Taniyama had provided examples illustrating the hypothesis but that was not enough to confirm it from the standpoint of mathematics. What was needed was a rigorous proof demonstrating the correspondence between modular forms and elliptic equations otherwise the supposed relationship could very well be treated as mere coincidence.Shimura was the only person in the symposium who believed in the profoundness of Taniyama’s idea and they both sought to find more evidence to lend credence to the hypothesis. Unfortunately, Taniyama committed suicide, a shocking blow to his companion Shimura.To honor his friend, Shimura was determined to unravel the correspondence between elliptic equations and modular forms. As he gathered more and more evidence that corroborated Taniyama’s hypothesis, he became more convinced in its truth. Eventually, the growing amount of evidence was such that although the hypothesis had not yet been proved, it gained credence among mathematicians. Instead of being dismissed as a mere coincidence, it now qualified as a conjecture: The Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, in honor of the 2 mathematicians who discovered it.It is difficult to overstate the significance of Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. Here is why: prior to the conjecture, elliptic equations and modular forms were two mathematical fields that were completely unrelated to each other. Then came the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture which postulated a deep connection between these two fields.An analogy is helpful here. Think of various subfields of mathematics as isolated islands of ideas and knowledge situated in a sea of ignorance and the mathematicians specializing in those subfields as inhabitants of those islands. You have the islands of differential equations, geometry, linear algebra, statistics, probability, topology, etc… The inhabitants of each island speak language, discuss ideas and concepts completely unknown to inhabitants of other islands.In this case, we have the islands of elliptic equations and modular forms. The Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, if proved to be true, amounted to a bridge between those two islands. The value of mathematical bridges is invaluable as they allow mathematicians in one subfield to examine ideas of already solved problems in another subfield. By studying those ideas, mathematicians can adapt and apply them to unsolved problems in their own field. This is referred to as the philosophy of parallelism, the application of ideas in one field to solve problems in a different field.Most importantly, the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture inspired the creation of the so-called Langlands Program, an ambitious scheme that seeks to prove a set of conjectures that will unify various subfields of mathematics, with the same enormous benefits provided by parallelism. In the 1960s, Robert Langlands was struck by the potency of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture that he was convinced that it was just one element of a much grander scheme of unification in mathematics. He was convinced that there were undiscovered connections between all the main mathematical topics and began seeking out those connections. Within a few years, a number such connections were uncovered. Although all of them were weaker and more speculative than Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, together they represented an intricate network of potential bridges connecting various mathematical subfields. Langland’s dream was to see successful proofs for all of these conjectures that would lead to a grand unified mathematics.By the 1970s, the Langlands program had defined the future course of progress for mathematics. However, all conjectures in the program had remained unproven, with the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture being the strongest among them. Consequently, a proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture would be the first step toward the fulfillment of the Langlands program AND would constitute one of the greatest achievements in modern number theory.Like Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture confounded mathematicians completely. For many years, no one succeeded in proving it. Many mathematicians regarded the conjecture as nothing more than a compelling puzzle of little practical value and thus did not bother their heads about proving it. Many were so skeptical that they were convinced it was impossible to prove the conjecture. There seemed to be little hope for the Langlands program.This was to change between 1984-1986 when a surprising discovery was made by German mathematician Gerhard Frey and validated by mathematician Ken Ribet.Part 3: The Link between Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture and Fermat’s Last TheoremIn 1984, a group of number theorists convened at a symposium in Oberwolfach in Germany to discuss various progresses in number theory research. Predictably, the participants reported on whatever breakthrough, small or big, that had been made toward proving the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. One of the speakers was Gerhard Frey - a German mathematician. Unbeknownst to him, the idea he was about to present would change the course of mathematics dramatically.While Gerhard did not offer new ideas as to how to prove the conjecture, he put forth the following remarkable claim:if anyone could prove the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, then they would immediately prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.Frey started by first assuming that IF, a big IF, Fermat’s Last Theorem was wrong, then there existed at least one set of whole number solutions for the equation:[math]x^n+y^n=z^n[/math]He labeled the hypothetical solution as [math](x,y,z)=(A,B,C)[/math] which meant that:[math]A^N+B^N=C^N[/math]Gerhard then proceeded to rearrange the equation above into an elliptic equation. Next, he explained to his audience that his elliptic equation derived from the solution to Fermat’s equation was, in his own word, so weird such that the E-series which defined it could not be matched to any M-series of a modular form. Hence, Gerhard’s elliptic equation could not be modular. This meant that the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture which stated that every modular form was an elliptic equation in disguise and vice versa was wrong.The implication of this claim was enormous for it meant that if one could prove that Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was true, then Fermat’s Last Theorem was also true. The logic is like this:If and only if Fermat’s Last Theorem is wrong, then Gerhard’s elliptic equation exists.Gerhard’s elliptic equation is so weird that it cannot be modular.The Taniyama-Shimura conjecture states that everything elliptic equation must be modular.Therefore, the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture must be wrong!Which is logically equivalent to:If the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture is true, then every elliptic equation must be modular.If every elliptic equation must be modular, then Gerhard’s elliptic equation cannot exist.If Gerhard’s elliptic equation cannot exist, then there can be no solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem.Therefore, Fermat’s Last Theorem is true.However, there was just one problem - Gerhard did not rigorously prove that his elliptic equation was not modular. What he did was making a plausibility argument that he hoped would be considered and proved by other mathematicians. Therefore, in order to prove that a proof of the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture implied the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, mathematicians had to demonstrate rigorously that Gerhard’s elliptic equation was not modular.This seemed to be a very straightforward problem that could be solved in a matter of days. However, it turned out to be much more difficult than initially thought. Months passed and no mathematician succeeded in proving that Gerhard’s elliptic equation was not modular.One of the mathematicians who undertook the challenge of proving Gerhard’s claim was Ken Ribet. Since Gerhard’s remarkable claim was made, Ken Ribet became preoccupied with proving that Gerhard’s elliptic equation was not modular. After 18 months, he got nowhere, or so he thought.Then, in 1986, while discussing the problem while sipping cappuccino with his friend - mathematician Barry Mazur, Barry suggested an ingenious leap of logic that instantly completed Ken Ribet’s proof that Gerhard’s elliptic equation was not modular. A great breakthrough in mathematics had been achieved over a cup of cappuccino!!! Ken Ribet had succeeded showing in that a proof of the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture was also the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. This new breakthrough meant that a new angle of attacking Fermat’s Last Theorem had opened up. Hope of solving the century-old problem was revived.However, that hope was also transient and soon displaced by doubts. The reason was that mathematicians had tried to prove Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture for 30 years and they had failed. The chance of making any progress at all seemed remote. The skeptics were convinced that anything might lead to a proof of the conjecture and thereby Fermat’s Last Theorem must be impossible. John Coates, Andrew J. Wiles’s advisor at Cambridge stated that:I myself was very skeptical that the beautiful link between Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture would actually lead to anything, because I must confess I did not think that the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was accessible to proof. Beautiful though this problem was, it seemed impossible to actually prove. I must confess I thought I probably wouldn’t see it proved in my lifetime.Even Ken Ribet who made the crucial breakthrough was pessimistic:I was one of the vast majority of people who believed that the Taniyama Shimura conjecture was completely inaccessible. I didn’t bother to try and prove it. I didn’t even think about trying to prove it.Everyone, except Andrew John Wiles.Part 4: The awe-inspiring journey of extreme willpowerAwesome!!! All of the preceding parts are there to explain the mathematical discoveries and breakthroughs that preceded the fascinating account of extreme willpower that I am about to recount.In the summer of 1986, while having tea at his friend’s house, Andrew J. Wiles, by then a mathematics professor at Princeton University, was apprised of Ken Ribet’s proof of the link between Taniyama-Shimura conjecture and Fermat’s Last Theorem. He vividly recalls the moment:I was electrified. I knew that moment that the course of my life was changing because this meant that to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem all I had to do was to prove the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. It meant that my childhood dream was now a respectable thing to work on. I just knew that I could never let it go. I just that I would go home and work on the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.Over two decades has passed since Andrew J. Wiles alighted on the book that inspired him to tackle Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1963. But it wasn’t until now, after years of working on mainstream math, that his childhood dream was revived and he could now see a path toward realizing it.Thanks to his advisor John Coates’s guidance Andrew J. Wiles probably knew more about elliptic equations than anyone else in the world; and at Princeton University, he had established himself as one of the most talented mathematicians of his generation. Despite his sterling talent and knowledge, he was fully aware that the challenge that lay ahead was immensely daunting.The one remarkable thing about his quest for the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was the decision to work on the problem in complete isolation and secrecy. This was contrary to the spirit of modern mathematical research which is characterized by a culture of collaboration. He rationalized his decision that:I realized that anything to do with Fermat’s Last Theorem generates too much interest. You can’t really focus yourself for years unless you have undivided concentration, which too many spectators would have destroyed.That’s a perfectly plausible explanation. But perhaps another rationale underlying his decision was his craving for glory. He feared the situation arising whereby he had completed the bulk of the proof but it was incomplete. At this point, if news of his breakthroughs were to break out, there would be nothing stopping a rival mathematician building on Wiles’s work, completing the proof, and stealing the glory. This was totally understandable. It was after all Andrew J. Wiles’s childhood dream and a respectable one.Also, to avoid evoking suspicion among his fellow mathematicians about what he was working on, Andrew J. Wiles employed the tactics of publishing his research unrelated to the proof of Taniyama-Shimura conjecture bit by bit every 6 months so as to give the impression that he was still actively engaging in mathematics research.Professor Andrew J. Wiles knew that to have any hope of proving the conjecture he would first have to completely immerse himself in the problem. He read all the recent mathematics journals, practiced using the latest mathematical techniques over and over until they became second nature to him. Acquiring the necessary knowledge for the mathematical battle required Andrew J. Wiles to spend the next 18 months acquainting himself with every bit of mathematics that had ever been applied to, or had been derived from, elliptic equations or modular forms. He did not mind. He regarded this preparatory period as totally worthwhile because he fully anticipated any serious attempt at proving the conjecture could take many years of intense effort and the utmost concentration.Andrew J. Wiles put on hold any work that was not directly related to Fermat’s Last Theorem. He also stopped attending conferences and symposium. He only continued to deliver lectures and guided seminars. Whenever possible he would work at home to spare himself the distractions of having to fulfill his academic duties. In the attic study of his room, he would do nothing but concentrate intensely on the problem for hours on end.Basically it’s just a matter of thinking. Often you write something down to clarify your thoughts, but not necessarily. In particular when you’ve reached a real impasse, when there’s a real problem that you want to overcome, then the routine kind of mathematical thinking is of no use to you. Leading up to that kind of new idea there has to be a long period of tremendous focus on the problem without any distraction. You have to really think about nothing but that problem-just concentrate on it. Then you stop. Afterwards there seems to be a kind of period of relaxation during which the subconscious appears to take over, and it’s during that time that some new insight comes.The problem professor Andrew sought to solve was as deceptively simple as Fermat’s Last Theorem: prove that every elliptic equation is modular. Yet beneath the superficial simplicity was an enormous technical difficulty that could be best described as infinity upon infinity. This was because each modular form is defined by an M-series composed of an infinite number of ingredients [math](M_1,M_2,M_3,…)[/math]. Similarly, each elliptic equation is defined by an E-series composed of an infinite number of ingredients [math](E_1,E_2,E_3,….)[/math]. So proving every elliptic equation is modular consists in proving that each ingredient of an M-series matches perfectly to the corresponding ingredient of an E-series (i.e, prove that [math]M_1=E_1,M_2=E_2,M_3=E_3,…[/math]). That’s an infinite problem. And since there is an infinite number of M-series AND an infinite number of E-series, this amounts to an infinite number of infinite problems, or infinity upon infinity.Andrew J. Wiles strained his mind seeking an approach. After one year of intense concentration, he decided to employ inductive proof method which lent itself well to the infinite nature of the problem. The challenge then for him was to somehow break the infinite number of ingredients comprising the M-series and E-series into an infinite number of individual cases so that he could inductively prove that each pair of ingredients from the E-series and M-series match.An analogy is helpful here: each pairing of the infinite E-series and M-series can be thought of as a piece of domino in an infinite line of dominoes. Proving the 1st case corresponds to toppling the 1st domino in the line, which will topple the 2nd, then the 3rd domino, and so on. This will guarantee that all the dominoes extending into infinity will be toppled.Drawing upon his knowledge, Andrew J. Wiles eventually saw that he could use Galois group theory to solve that challenge. After months of analysis, he succeeded in using Galois group theory to break the infinite M and E series into their constituent pieces. He also succeeded in proving that [math]E_1=M_1[/math] for all of the infinite number of infinite M- and E-series. This ingenious approach was a significant achievement that deserved a publication in its own right. Making this tremendous progress had already taken Andrew J. Wiles a good 2 years and there was no telling how many more years it would take him to tackle the next challenge: which was to prove that if [math]E_1=M_1[/math], then [math]E_2=M_2,E_3=M_3,....[/math]At this point, Andrew J. Wiles started to have misgivings about the chance of success. He wondered if he was wasting time and energy on an intractable problem. As if to allay his apprehension, he explained:You might ask how I could devote an unlimited amount of time to a problem that might simply not be soluble. The answer is that I just loved working on this problem and I was obsessed. I enjoyed pitting my wits against it. Furthermore, I always knew that the mathematics I was thinking about, even if it wasn’t strong enough to prove Taniyama-Shimura, and hence Fermat, would prove something; it was certainly good mathematics and that was true all along. There was certainly a possibility that I would never get to Fermat, but there was no question that I was simply wasting my time.Then, on March 8th 1988, Andrew J. Wiles got a shocking news that might put an abrupt end to his mathematical battle. Newspapers announced that a Japanese mathematician, Yoichi Miyaoka, had solved Fermat’s Last Theorem.This news stunned mathematicians worldwide. At a mathematics conference in Bonn, Germany, Miyaoka presented his proof, and two weeks later he released his 5-page proof. A line-by-line scrutiny of the proof followed. Within a few days several mathematicians pointed out a contradiction that invalidated the proof. Thus, Fermat’s Last Theorem remained unsolved.Unbeknownst to the world, the news of the flawed proof brought deep relief to Andrew J. Wiles. He was pleased to to know that the glory of proving Fermat’s Last Theorem had not yet been claimed. He carried on his secret and dogged endeavor to prove Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.In 1988, after 3 years of intense effort and single-minded concentration, Andrew Wiles had made the first significant step toward proving Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. He had succeeded in breaking up the infinite M and E series into their infinite number of components. He also had proved the 1st case [math]E_1=M_1[/math]. Recall the domino analogy, now that he had toppled the 1st domino, next he had to find new techniques that would produce the toppling effect for the remaining dominoes. In hindsight and from the perspective of non-mathematicians, this all seemed easy and natural. But making such progresses, big or small, had required tremendous patience and inner courage to overcome countless bouts of misgivings. Andrew J. Wiles likened his mathematics battle as a journey through a dark unexplored mansion:One enters the first room of the mansion and it’s dark. Completely dark. One stumbles around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it’s all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they are momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of, and couldn’t exist without, the many months of stumbling around in the dark that precede them.In 1990, Andrew J. Wiles realized that he was in what was apparently the darkest room in the mansion - one which he had been exploring for almost two years. He still hadn’t found any way of showing that [math]E_1=M_1[/math], then [math]E_2=M_2,E_3=M_3[/math], and so on. Having tried every technique that had been published in the literature, he found all of them inadequate. His last attempt involved the application of Iwasawa theory which he had learned during his graduate study. After months of trying to adapt Iwasawa theory to solve the problem, the theory also proved ineffectual. At this point, his worry that he might not be able to fulfill his lifelong dream intensified even more:I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal. It could be that the methods needed to solve this particular problem may simply be beyond present-day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years. So even if I was on the right track, I could be living in the wrong century.In 1991, after 5 years of isolating himself from mainstream mathematics and encountering setbacks after setbacks, Andrew J. Wiles decided to return to the mathematics community to meet fellow mathematics. Through discussions with them, he hoped to see if he could find something new, especially novel techniques invented by someone who had not published them. He traveled to Boston to attend a major conference on elliptic equations where he would meet major players in number theory.Luck was with Andrew J. Wiles because there he fortuitously saw his former advisor John Coates. He recalls:Coates mentioned to me that a student of his named Matthias Flach was writing a beautiful paper in which he was analyzing elliptic equations. He was building on recent method devised by Kolyvagin and it looked as though his method was tailor-made for my problem. It seemed to be exactly what I needed.Consequently, upon his return to Princeton, Andrew J. Wiles abandoned completely the Iwasawa theory approach and devoted himself night and day to mastering the methods originated and refined by Kolyvagin and Flach. After several months of familiarizing himself with the technique, he applied it to his problem. Much to his delight: It worked!!! Kolyvagin-Flach method provided exactly the toppling effect he had been seeking. Then, he made the next significant breakthrough which was the realization that all elliptic equations could be classified into various families. The result was that Kolyvagin-Flach method that worked on one elliptic equation would work on all elliptic equations within a particular family. He kept applying the technique to all families of elliptic equations.In 1992, after 6 years of single-minded commitment and intense concentration on the problem, Andrew J. Wiles was confident that the end was in sight. Week after week, he was making good progress, proving that newer and bigger families of elliptic equations must be modular. It seemed to be just a matter of time before he conquered the outstanding elliptic equations. At this point however, doubt set in. He started wondering whether he was using Kolyvagin-Flach method, something he had learned only a few months earlier, in a truly rigorous manner:During that year I worked extremely hard trying to make the Kolyvagin-Flach method work, but it involved a lot of sophisticated machinery that I wasn’t really familiar with. There was a lot of hard algebra which required me to learn a lot of new mathematics. Then, in January of 1993, I decided that I needed to confide in someone who was an expert in the kind of geometric techniques I was invoking for this. I wanted to choose very carefully who I told, because they would have to keep it confidential. I chose to tell Nick Katz.Professor Nick Katz was a fellow mathematician at Princeton University and a close friend of Andrew J. Wiles. When his friend revealed to him that he had been proving Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, Nick Katz was astonished. He promised to keep this a secret for Andrew.Nick Katz quickly grasped the magnitude of the secret he had just been told. Now it was his job to try to comprehend the mountain of complex calculations made by Andrew J. Wiles on the basis of Kolyvagin-Flach method. Virtually everything Andrew had done was so revolutionary and sophisticated that Nick Katz recommended Andrew to present his work in a series of graduate-level lectures. To prevent anyone from knowing that the work presented was the proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, Nick Katz named the lectures “Calculations on Elliptic Curves”. Nick Katz would be in the audience listening to Andrew J. Wiles explanation. The hope here was that by lecturing, Andrew J. Wiles would be compelled to explain everything step-by-step to the graduate students and Nick Katz. This would reveal any logical gap in his proof.The plan worked. Eventually, all of the graduate students, baffled by the materials, stopped attending the lectures. Only Nick Katz remained. In the end, Nick Katz judged that Andrew J. Wiles’s proof was correct.Confident in the judgment of his friend Nick Katz, Andrew J. Wiles proceeded to apply Kolyvagin-Flach method to all families of elliptic equations. One day, he finished the proof.It was a stupendous achievement!! After 7 years of tremendous dedication and concentration filled with frustration and misgivings, Andrew J. Wiles had proved the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture and - by virtue of the link between the conjecture and Fermat’s Last Theorem - proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. It was time to unveil his brainchild to the world. The opportunity came quickly.From 21-23 June 1993 in his hometown of Cambridge, England, Andrew j. Wiles delivered the historic lectures of the 20th century. It was a perfect place for such a monumental event because Cambridge was where he stumbled upon the problem that inspired his childhood dream that ultimately led to the seven-year intellectual endeavor whose fruit he was about to present. As if to engender a feeling of suspense among the attendees, his series of 3 lectures had rather unexciting title: Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, and Galois Representations. As a result, mathematicians who attended had no idea that it was the full proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. But after the 1st 2 series, rumors circulated widely that Andrew J. Wiles was presenting the proof of the conjecture. On 23rd, June, the lecture hall was fully occupied. Everyone held their breath as they beheld the proof of the hardest mathematical problem. Finally, Andrew J. Wiles concluded his lecture with the historic words:I think I’ll stop hereProfessor Andrew J. Wiles at the lecture of the centuryNewspaper around the world announced that Andrew J. Wiles’s success in solving the century-old problemEveryone was awe-struck by the fact that they had just witnessed the most important moment in the history of mathematics wherein a 350-year-old problem had been solved!! Soon, the news spread beyond the little town of Cambridge to the outside world. It soon appeared on the front page of almost every major newspaper around the world. Overnight, Andrew J. Wiles was elevated to the status of a celebrity. Mathematicians around the world heartily congratulated Andrew J. Wiles for his crowning achievement. They were pleased to see that finally they could put their mind at rest on a problem that had bedeviled them for 3 centuries.But, there was a problem.A fundamental error and the 14-month battle to save his brainchildBut the lecture was only half the work done. For the proof to be accepted as valid, it had to be rigorously examined to ensure that there wasn’t even a slightest logical flaw that could destroy its validity. Thus, Andrew J. Wiles had to spend the whole summer waiting anxiously for the result of the verification process.The proof was submitted to the journal Inventiones Mathematicae for verification. So great were the depth and extent of the proof that it had to be submitted to an unprecedented level of scrutiny. Barry Mazur, the journal’s editor, appointed six referees instead of two as for other mathematical proofs. Andrew J. Wiles’s proof was divided into six chapters, each of which was assigned to one of the six referees. Chapter 3 was the responsibility of Nick Katz, the mathematician who had examined Andrew’s proof last year in a series of lecture at Princeton University.This was when the worst fear for Professor Andrew J. Wiles materialized. When Nick Katz examined Chapter 3, he detected what seemed to be a small problem so he sent faxes and emails asking Andrew J. Wiles for an explanation. At first, he thought the problem was just a slight difficulty in understanding his argument as all the other errors he had been asked about. But not this time. Nick Katz insisted on Andrew examining it more closely. In September, Andrew J. Wiles started to realize what had been initially thought to be a slight difficulty in understanding his proof turned out actually a serious fundamental flaw.That fundamental error concerned the Kolyvagin-Flach method and because it was so subtle that it had eluded him up to that point. In essence, the problem was that there was no guarantee that the Kolyvagin-Flach method worked as Andrew J. Wiles had intended. He thought he had adapted and strengthened the method sufficiently to make it applicable to his problem. But Nick Katz argued that was not necessarily the case. The implication was potentially dramatic and devastating. Andrew J. Wiles’s proof spanned 200 pages. It was essentially a gigantic argument, intricately constructed from hundreds of sophisticated calculations connected together by thousands of logical links. Yet just one weak or broken logical link was sufficient to cause the whole proof to fall apart. The absolutism of mathematics demanded that Andrew J. Wiles proved rigorously that Kolyvagin-Flach method worked for every element of the E-series and M-series and for all families of elliptic equations.Only a few weeks earlier, newspaper around the globe had announced Andrew J. Wiles the most brilliant mathematician in the world, and that after 350 years of frustration number theorists were relieved to see that they had at last solved Fermat’s last puzzle. But, now that the error was discovered, Andrew J. Wiles had to confront the embarrassing prospect of having to admit that he had made a mistake. To prevent the loss of his reputation, he frantically worked on fixing the problem before the world became aware that his proof was flawed. He recalled:I couldn’t give up. I was obsessed by this problem and I still believed that the Kolyvagin-Flach method just needed a little tinkering. I just needed to modify it in some small way and then it would work just fine. I decided to go straight back into my old mode and completely shut myself off from the outside world. I had to focus again, but this time under much more difficult circumstances. For a long time I would think that the fix was just around the corner, that I was just missing something simple and it would all just fit into place the next day. Of course it could have happened that way, but as time went by it seemed that the problem just became more intransigent.Up to that point, the only people who were aware of the error were Andrew J. Wiles and the six mathematicians assigned to examine the proof, including Nick Katz. The referees agreed to keep the matter confidential so that Andrew could concentrate on fixing the error. But as months passed and the manuscript had not been released as promised, rumors started circulating that there was a problem with the proof. People all over the world started sending questions inquiring about the proof. They also wondered what Andrew J. Wiles was doing and if he was withholding a secret from the rest of the world.Andrew J. Wiles did his best to ignore the storm of suspicion raging outside. Once again, he isolated himself completely from the outside world to focus correcting the error. When an error is found in a proof there are two possible outcomes. One is that the error can be fixed quickly with little difficulty. The other is that the error is so fundamental that it is exceedingly difficult or beyond salvation and the proof just falls completely apart. For Andrew J. Wiles, the error in his proof was of the second case. Every time he fixed one problem, another would appear in another part of the proof. It was analogous to trying to put a carpet in a room where the carpet was bigger than the room; and when someone tried to fit the carpet in any one corner, it would pop up in another corner.It is noteworthy that not all was lost for Andrew J. Wiles. His proof was divided into 6 chapters, each of which was an outstanding achievement in its own right. The error was found in chapter 3 so if that chapter was excluded, what remained still represented a magnificent accomplishment. But without chapter 3 there would be no proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture and hence no proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem and hence no fulfillment of his lifelong dream.Six months had passed and there was growing urging from the mathematics community for more transparency. The storm of suspicion intensified. What was initially regarded as one of the milestones in the history of mathematics was turning into a joke. The previous summer Andrew J. Wiles was announced the world’s most famous mathematical celebrity. Already, his image was being tarnished and he was facing the prospect of humiliation and the loss of his reputation. One can only imagine the intense feeling of deep despair and anxiety that tormented him in this time span of his life.In spite of all the ridicule and suspicion, Andrew J. Wiles carried on his dogged attempt to fix the error in his proof. Despite being inundated with requests to release his manuscript, he refused to do so. After 7 years of immense effort, he was not prepared to let someone else complete the proof and claim the glory. The person who would prove Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was not the one who did the most work, but the one who delivered the final and complete proof.After enduring so much frustration and fear, Andrew J. Wiles confided to Peter Sarnak, a fellow mathematician at Princeton that the situation was getting desperate and that he was on verge of admitting defeat. Deeply sympathetic to the predicament of his friend, Sarnak pointed out that the cause of the problem was that Andrew had no one trustworthy to work with on a regular basis, someone he could discuss ideas with and who could suggested alternative approaches for him to explore. Therefore, Sarnak advised Andrew to recruit someone he could trust to work with him. It was a sound advice. Andrew J. Wiles enlisted Richard Taylor, one of his former students and also one of the six examiners of his proof. Richard Taylor thus could be doubly trusted. Last year, he had witnessed his former supervisor present the proof of the century. Now he was to help his advisor fix the flawed proof.They both worked tirelessly to prove that Kolyvagin-Flach method was applicable to the problem. Occasionally they would make progress. But inevitably they would find themselves back to the drawing board. Having explored all paths and hit dead ends after dead ends, they both realized that they wereat the heart of an unimaginably vast labyrinth. Their deepest fear was that the labyrinth was infinite and without exit, and that they would be doomed to wander aimlessly and indefinitely within it.THEN MIRACLE HAPPENED!!!That summer in 1994, Andrew and Richard made no progress. After eight years of unwavering determination, Andrew J. Wiles finally contemplated resigning to defeat. He confided in Richard that he saw no point in carrying on with their attempts to correct the proof.Although Andrew J. Wiles’s endeavor to solve the world’s hardest mathematical puzzle appeared to have ended in total failure, he could at least reflect on the preceding 8 years of immense hard work and be reassured that the bulk of his work was still valuable. He had provided mathematicians with an arsenal of new mathematical techniques and approaches that they could leverage to tackle other problems. There was no shame in his failure, and he was prepared to accept the prospect of defeat. He felt a deep despondency and disappointment when he thought about giving up after having worked so hard with the utmost concentration and a burning passion in the previous eight consecutive years of his life.Having planned to remain in Princeton until September 1994, Richard suggested that they both persevere for another month. If the error could not be fixed at the end of September, then they would give up, publicly acknowledge their failure, and publish the flawed proof to allow others the opportunity to fix it. Andrew J. Wiles agreed.As a consolation, Andrew J. Wiles at least wanted to know why he had failed. He decided to spend September looking one last time at the Kolyvagin-Flach method to determine why it did not work. But, this was when miracle happened and it would be one of the most telling moments for mathematics and his life because in this period, Andrew J. Wiles finally understood what the problem was. He vividly recalls:I was sitting at my desk one Monday morning, September 19, examining the Kolyvagin-Flach method. It wasn’t that I believed I could make it work, but I thought that at least I could explain why it didn’t work. I thought I was clutching at straws, but I wanted to reassure myself. Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation. I realized that, although the Kolyvagin-Flach method wasn’t working completely, it was all I needed to make my original approach to the problem from three years’ earlier work. So out of the ashes of Kolyvagin-Flach seemed to rise the true answer to the problem.The approach from three years earlier alluded to the Iwasawa theory I briefly mentioned before. The key insight Andrew J. Wiles had here was that although Iwasawa theory on its own was inadequate, and so was Kolyvagin-Flach method, these two techniques complemented each other perfectly to make the proof work.It was an extraordinary stroke of genius!!!! Andrew J. Wiles was jubilant to see that he only had to combine Iwasawa theory and Kolyvagin-Flach method to make the proof work. This moment of inspiration was so profound that he was moved to tears!!!!It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and so elegant. I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it and I just stared at it in disbelief for twenty minutes. Then during the day I walked around the department, and I’d keep coming back to my desk looking to see if it was still there. It was still there. I couldn’t contain myself, I was so excited. It was the most important moment of my working life. Nothing I ever do again will mean as much.This was more than a fulfillment of his childhood dream. Having been pushed to the verge of failure, Andrew J. Wiles had fought back tenaciously to prove his genius to the world. The preceding fourteen months had been the most depressing and painful period of his mathematical career. Now one brilliant insight had delivered him from the jaw of defeat.And so Andrew J. Wiles successfully corrected his proof. He presented the complete manuscript to his wife Nada as a birthday present he had missed one year ago. Also, he released the manuscript to the public. He had succeeded in proving Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture AND in doing so, he had fulfilled his long-cherished childhood dream of proving Fermat’s Last Theorem.Andrew J. Wiles’s proof will forever stand as a timeless intellectual achievement of the highest order. It is regarded as the mathematical equivalent of splitting the atom or finding the structure of DNA for it revolutionized number theory in one fell swoop. During his eight-year mathematical endeavor, professor Andrew J. Wiles had synthesized virtually all the breakthroughs in 20th century number theory into one highly sophisticated proof. He established the bridge between the two islands of mathematics that had hitherto been completely unrelated to each other: elliptic equations and number theory, and thereby bestowing upon mathematicians the benefits of parallelism. Not only that, he had created completely new mathematical techniques and married them with existing techniques in absolutely novel ways. In doing so, he had provided mathematicians with invaluable tools to tackle a whole range of new problems.What’s more? As explained in part 2, since Taniyama Shimura conjecture inspired the Langlands’s grand scheme of a unified mathematics, Andrew J. Wiles’s proof served to revive mathematicians’ confidence in the Langlands’s program and motivate them to prove all the conjectures in the program. The implication? - He had laid a solid foundation toward accomplishing the most ambitious scheme in mathematics.But as equally impressive and praiseworthy as his exceptional intellectual achievements was his passionate pursuit to solve the most difficult problem in mathematics. As mentioned before, when most mathematicians had either failed or ignored the problem completely, Andrew J. Wiles was probably the only one person who held onto the conviction that there was a solution to the problem and he was determined to find it. He was undaunted by a problem that had defeated the best mathematicians in history. What’s more? He was the only one who had the audacity to work on the problem in total isolation and secrecy, without the help and encouragement from anyone most of the time. In complete solitude, he tackled the problem using only his brain, intense focus, and an extraordinary zeal engendered by his childhood dream. Despite not knowing how many years it would take him to complete the proof, despite all the bouts of self-doubts, apprehension, despite spending days, weeks, months, and even years wandering in the uncharted territories of mathematics, he never wavered. Even when confronted by the prospect of failure and the loss of his reputation, he persevered valiantly until the very end. Eight years of unfailing dedication to and single-minded concentration on only ONE problem. Eight years of pursuing his long-cherished dream until the end despite immense frustration, misgiving, and countless setbacks. For me, this was the ultimate manifestation of supreme passion, perseverance, and the true power of genius - the pure force of will to make all the necessary mistakes to achieve the impossible, to succeed where everyone else had failed. What started out as a childhood dream had culminated in an awe-inspiring story of willpower, discipline, genius and fortitude in the face of enormous uncertainty and challenge!!!There’s no other problem that will mean the same to me. This was my childhood passion. There’s nothing to replace that. I’ve solved it. I’ll try other problems, I’m sure. Some of them will be very hard and I’ll have a sense of achievement again, but there’s no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way Fermat did.I had this very rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life what had been my childhood dream. I know it’s a rare privilege, but if you can tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it’s more rewarding than anything imaginable. Having solved this problem there’s certainly a sense of loss, but at the same time there is this tremendous sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that for eight years I was thinking about it all the time - when I woke up in the morning to when I went to sleep at night. That’s a long time to think about one thing. That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is at rest.There will never be another answer that will mean the same to me!!! I have this incredible honor of doing justice to one of the greatest intellectual achievements in history and making a tribute to my intellectual hero: Sir Andrew John Wiles. I have been so captivated by this beautiful and inspirational story that I have thought about it all the time and the fire of enthusiasm for this story is still burning brightly in my mind, even as I am typing the conclusion to this answer. I hope I have succeeded in infusing the readers with the mixture of emotions this brilliant mathematician had experienced himself in this quest to fulfill his childhood dream. If you managed to read this story in its entirety, I want to express my deep appreciation for reading my answer!Merry Christmas everyone!!You can learn more about this fascinating story here:BBC - Horizon - 1996 - Fermat's Last Theorem - video dailymotionFermat's Last Theorem (book)

Q. Are Korean-Americans generally wealthy?A. Koreans are the poorest Asians in America.The shocking truth about Korean-American wealthThe staggering difference between rich Asian Americans and poor Asian Americans (Washingtonpost.com)Korean Americans (Pew Research)The Rise of Asian AmericansTHE SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT KOREAN-AMERICAN WEALTH (riseoftheasianmale.wordpress.com)If someone asked you who the most “successful” Asians in America are, which ethnic groups would you name?Chances are, Korean-Americans are somewhere near the top of your list.Your perception may have been based on statistics of wealth in Asia, where South Korean GDP per capita ($35,277) measures just behind Japan ($37,390) and far ahead of China ($15,424), the Philippines ($7,696), and Vietnam ($6,422).But the demographics of Asian-Americans are completely different than that of Asians in Asia.There are major disparities in wealth accumulation across various racial and ethnic groups in Los Angeles, which serves as a pretty good sample selection since it has the highest concentration of Asians in America.Let’s start with annual salary, or median family income.Median Korean-American household annual income is significantly lower than that of Filipino-American households ($60k vs $80k). And despite a much higher percentage of Korean Americans having obtained a Bachelor’s degree compared to Vietnamese Americans (57.1% vs. 36.5%), Korean-American median annual income is only $10k higher. Notice it is also only $6,500 higher than US black families.When measuring real money, you’re looking at wealth, defined by net worth across all assets including checking and savings accounts, stocks and mutual funds, retirement accounts, businesses, and equity in home values, all while factoring debt, NOT income.Out of the six largest ethnic Asian groups in the Los Angeles MSA, (in order by population: Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Japanese and Indians), Koreans have the lowest net worth by an enormous margin behind Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Indian families, and it’s lower than that of US black households.Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos have a much longer history of having an established presence in the US, which might explain why they have significantly higher median net asset values, due to a more robust support network and potential inter-generational transfers of wealth, compared to Koreans and Vietnamese, who have only established themselves in the US in large numbers relatively recently.However, Vietnamese are still ahead of Koreans in America in net worth. If you are familiar with the history of Asian immigration to the US, the fact that Korean-American net worth is lower than Vietnamese-American net worth is even more shocking. Whereas other immigrants who came after the 1965 Immigration Act were still largely screened for education and work skills, waves of Vietnamese immigrants came to America through the passing of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act in 1975 and the Refugee Act of 1980, and many poor, uneducated and unskilled Vietnamese immigrants came to the US.Despite this fact, Vietnamese still possess higher total net worth than Koreans.In other words, there is no excuse for Koreans to be the poorest Asians in America.Grace ParkKorean AmericansHistoryEarly Korean immigrants mostly began their journey to the U.S. in Hawaii. Between 1903 and 1905, more than 7,000 Koreans were recruited for plantation labor work there. Korean immigrants, about 40% of whom were Christians, built many churches in Hawaii.Korean immigration to the mainland U.S. was sparse through World War II. The arrivals included about a thousand workers who came from Hawaii, about a hundred Korean mail-order “picture brides” and perhaps 900 students, many of whom fled because of their opposition to the Japanese annexation of their nation in 1910.A relatively small number of Koreans arrived in the U.S. in mid-century as brides of service members in the Korean War, orphans adopted by U.S. couples, or professionals and students.The majority of the present Korean population in the U.S. came after the 1965 immigration act was implemented. Educational attainment increased in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, but few job opportunities for skilled workers were available. Skilled professionals moved to U.S. and many other countries. Some immigrants founded small businesses; Koreans have the highest self-employment rate among U.S. Asian groups.In 2010, an estimated 1.26 million adult Koreans Americans were in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Koreans are the fifth-largest group among Asian Americans and represent about 10% of the adult Asian population in the U.S.Daniel KimCharacteristics (2010 ACS)Nativity and citizenship. Nearly eight-in-ten (79%) adult Korean Americans in the United States are foreign born, compared with 74% of adult Asian Americans and 16% of adults in the U.S. A majority of Korean adults are U.S. citizens (67%), lower than the share among overall adult Asian population (70%) and the national share (91%).Language. Slightly more than half of Korean Americans (54%) speak English proficiently,43 compared with 63% of all Asian Americans and 90% of the U.S. population overall.Age. The median age of adult Korean Americans is 40, similar to that of all adult Asian Americans (41) and lower than the national median (45).Marital status. More than half of adult Korean Americans (56%) are married, a share slightly lower than for all Asian Americans (59%) but higher than the national share (51%).Fertility. The share of Korean-American women ages 18 to 44 who gave birth in the 12 months before the 2010 American Community Survey was 5.2%, lower than the comparable share among Asian-American women overall (6.8%) and the national share (7.1%). About 9% of Korean-American women who gave birth in the previous 12 months were unmarried, a share lower than for all comparable Asian-American women (15%) and all comparable U.S. women (37%).Educational attainment. Among Korean Americans ages 25 and older, more than half (53%) have obtained at least a bachelor’s degree; this is higher than the Asian-American share (49%) as well as the national share (28%).Income. Median annual personal earnings for Korean-American full-time, year-round workers are $45,000, lower than for all Asian Americans ($48,000) but higher than for all U.S. adults ($40,000). Among households, the median annual income for Koreans is $50,000, lower than for all Asians ($66,000) but slightly higher than for the U.S. population ($49,800).Homeownership. Close to half of Korean Americans (48%) own a home, compared with 58% of all Asian Americans and 65% of the U.S. population overall.Poverty status. The share of adult Korean Americans who live in poverty is 15%, higher than the shares of all Asian Americans (12%) and of the U.S. population overall (13%).Regional dispersion. More than four-in-ten (45%) adult Korean Americans live in the West, compared with 47% of Asian Americans and 23% of the U.S. population overall.AttitudesHere are a few key findings from the 2012 Asian-American survey about Korean Americans compared with other major U.S. Asian groups:Across U.S. Asian groups, Korean Americans seem to be more strongly connected to their intra-ethnic communities. They are the most likely to say that all or most of their friends share the same ethnic heritage (58%).Compared with other U.S. Asian groups, Korean Americans are among the most likely to say that it is very important to them that future generations of Koreans living in the U.S. speak their ancestral language (62%).Korean Americans are more likely than U.S. Asians from other groups to say that parents from their country of origin put too much academic pressure on their children (60%); only 30% say Korean American parents put the right amount of pressure on their children; and 5% say they do not put enough pressure on children.Korean Americans stand out for their negative views on their group’s relations with blacks. Fully half say these two groups don’t get along well; while 39% say they get along pretty well and just 4% say they get along very well.The staggering difference between rich Asian Americans and poor Asian AmericansNot all Asian Americans have fancy kitchens and flawless families. (iStock)If you only looked at the most basic data, you might get the impression that Asian Americans are thriving. They earn more, on average, than white Americans, and they’re catching up in terms of average household wealth. These kinds of simple statistics are one reason that Asian Americans are still stereotyped as a “model minority.”But Asian Americans have tremendously divergent experiences. Some are upwardly mobile, but many others struggle with poverty. The differences are hard to see in the average numbers.A new report from the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, highlights the problem with lumping Asian Americans together. According to economists Christian Weller and Jeffrey Thompson, Asian Americans are such an economically diverse group that wealth inequality is actually worse among Asian Americans than among white Americans.The economists used hard-to-obtain government data to provide a clearer look at Asian American wealth. Census figures already show that income inequality is higher among Asian Americans. Indian American households, for example, earn nearly twice the national average, while Bangladeshi and Cambodian Americans have lower-than-average household incomes. Asian Americans earn more than whites on average, but they also have higher rates of poverty.The new report suggests that for Asian Americans, wealth inequality is also more pronounced.There are many ways to measure inequality — in this case, the economists compared different wealth thresholds. According to the data, white families in the top 10 percent each had more than $1.26 million in 2010-2013, while white families in the bottom 20 percent each had less than $10,468. In other words, a typical rich white family was about 120 times wealthier than a typical poor white family.Among Asian Americans, the cutoff to make it into the top 10 percent was actually higher — about $1.44 million. And the families at the bottom end seemed to be worse off — the poorest 20 percent of families were each worth less than $9,319. So a rich Asian household was about 168 times richer than a poor Asian household.Such disparities are completely invisible according to the usual way we consider racial differences, which focuses on averages, not levels of inequality. Asian American households and white American households in fact have about the same amount of mean wealth — about $680,000, according to CAP’s calculations. That creates the illusion that Asians are about as well off as whites. But as the report suggests, the richest Asian Americans are far more affluent than the poorest Asian Americans — so much so that they skew the data and obscure the problems of the people at the bottom.“The communities that we know aren’t doing so well — people from countries like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia — they make up close to 40 [percent] to 45 percent of the Asian American population,” said Weller, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a senior fellow at CAP. “By only looking at averages, you’re papering over the substantial struggles of a huge chunk of lower-income, less wealthy Asian Americans.”“The problem is that ‘Asian American’ doesn’t hold together as a category,” said Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland. “The group is too diverse. It doesn’t really make sense to compare recent Chinese, Korean or Pakistani immigrants who are working in tech and engineering jobs to people who came as refugees in the 1980s and their working-class descendants.”It’s hard to collect data on Asian Americans because they are still only about 5 percent to 6 percent of the population, so some parts of the CAP report should be taken with caution. The conclusions are based on national surveys conducted every three years by the Federal Reserve, each covering several thousand Americans, including a few hundred Asian Americans. The economists say that the recent differences in wealth inequality are large enough to be statistically significant at the 10 percent level. So this is suggestive, but not slam-dunk evidence.The CAP report also contains some good news. In terms of mean wealth, Asian Americans seem to have more or less closed the gap with white Americans, largely because the richest Asians have become richer. In terms of median wealth, Asian Americans may have even surpassed white Americans in the years between 2001 and 2007. (These trends square with similar data from the Census Bureau, which has a much larger, but in some ways perhaps less accurate, survey on American wealth.)Source: Center for American Progress calculations using FRB Survey of Consumer FinancesThe housing boom and bust explains a lot of the patterns in inequality. Homes tend to be the most expensive asset a family owns, and although the Asian American homeownership rate (about 60 percent) is lower than the white homeownership rate (about 74 percent), Asian Americans also tend to live in coastal metropolises where homes are expensive. In the early 2000s, the Asian Americans who were fortunate enough to own homes had their net worth skyrocket, increasing wealth inequality between Asian American homeowners and Asian American renters, as well as helping Asian Americans catch up to white Americans.Source: Center for American Progress calculations using FRB Survey of Consumer FinancesAnother reason that Asian American wealth has been creeping upward is that the Asian American population is getting older on average. In 2015, the median age for Asian Americans was 36.3, up from 32.7 in 2000. (Whites, in contrast, are the oldest on average — their median age in 2015 was 43.) People in their 50s and 60s, of course, tend to be the wealthiest because they’ve been saving for retirement.It’s important to keep all of these findings in perspective. Compared with whites and Asians, African Americans and Hispanics are much less wealthy, and they don’t seem to be making much progress. Data from the same survey shows that both groups have actually been losing ground relative to whites in recent years. Part of the problem is that these groups earn less on average. But they also seem to suffer from inferior opportunities.“It appears that the returns that African Americans and Hispanics get on similar assets are lower,” said Ray Boshara, director of the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “So buying a home or pursuing an education does not yield the same amount of wealth.”Taken in that light, the gains in wealth among Asian Americans seem all the more remarkable. As the CAP report shows, this is mostly a phenomenon of the richest Asians pulling away from the rest. Even so, hasn’t inequality been the story of the United States recently? In that sense, at least, Asian Americans really have been a model minority.Korean Americans(migrationpolicy.org)Jamie ChungKorean Americans - WikipediaThe Rise of Asian AmericansUpdated Edition, April 04, 2013: This new edition of our 2012 report on Asian Americans provides data on 14 smaller Asian origin groups with population counts below 500,000 in the 2010 Census, along with detailed data on the economic and demographic characteristics of adults in nine of these groups. Our original 2012 report contained survey and Census data on all Asian Americans as well as specific information on the six largest Asian origin groups.Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States. They are more satisfied than the general public with their lives, finances and the direction of the country, and they place more value than other Americans do on marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success, according to a comprehensive new nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center.A century ago, most Asian Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination. Today they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines. When newly minted medical school graduate Priscilla Chan married Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last month, she joined the 37% of all recent Asian-American brides who wed a non-Asian groom.These milestones of economic success and social assimilation have come to a group that is still majority immigrant. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of Asian-American adults were born abroad; of these, about half say they speak English very well and half say they don’t.Asians recently passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the United States. The educational credentials of these recent arrivals are striking. More than six-in-ten (61%) adults ages 25 to 64 who have come from Asia in recent years have at least a bachelor’s degree. This is double the share among recent non-Asian arrivals, and almost surely makes the recent Asian arrivals the most highly educated cohort of immigrants in U.S. history.Compared with the educational attainment of the population in their country of origin, recent Asian immigrants also stand out as a select group. For example, about 27% of adults ages 25 to 64 in South Korea and 25% in Japan have a bachelor’s degree or more.In contrast, nearly 70% of comparably aged recent immigrants from these two countries have at least a bachelor’s degree.Recent Asian immigrants are also about three times as likely as recent immigrants from other parts of the world to receive their green cards—or permanent resident status—on the basis of employer rather than family sponsorship (though family reunification remains the most common legal gateway to the U.S. for Asian immigrants, as it is for all immigrants).The modern immigration wave from Asia is nearly a half century old and has pushed the total population of Asian Americans—foreign born and U.S born, adults and children—to a record 18.2 million in 2011, or 5.8% of the total U.S. population, up from less than 1% in 1965.By comparison, non-Hispanic whites are 197.5 million and 63.3%, Hispanics 52.0 million and 16.7% and non-Hispanic blacks 38.3 million and 12.3%.Asian Americans trace their roots to any of dozens of countries in the Far East, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Each country of origin subgroup has its own unique history, culture, language, religious beliefs, economic and demographic traits, social and political values, and pathways into America.But despite often sizable subgroup differences, Asian Americans are distinctive as a whole, especially when compared with all U.S. adults, whom they exceed not just in the share with a college degree (49% vs. 28%), but also in median annual household income ($66,000 versus $49,800) and median household wealth ($83,500 vs. $68,529).They are noteworthy in other ways, too. According to the Pew Research Center survey of a nationally representative sample of 3,511 Asian Americans, conducted by telephone from Jan. 3 to March 27, 2012, in English and seven Asian languages, they are more satisfied than the general public with their lives overall (82% vs. 75%), their personal finances (51% vs. 35%) and the general direction of the country (43% vs. 21%).They also stand out for their strong emphasis on family. More than half (54%) say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in life; just 34% of all American adults agree. Two-thirds of Asian-American adults (67%) say that being a good parent is one of the most important things in life; just 50% of all adults agree.John ChoTheir living arrangements align with these values. They are more likely than all American adults to be married (59% vs. 51%); their newborns are less likely than all U.S. newborns to have an unmarried mother (16% vs. 41%); and their children are more likely than all U.S. children to be raised in a household with two married parents (80% vs. 63%).They are more likely than the general public to live in multi-generational family households. Some 28% live with at least two adult generations under the same roof, twice the share of whites and slightly more than the share of blacks and Hispanics who live in such households. U.S. Asians also have a strong sense of filial respect; about two-thirds say parents should have a lot or some influence in choosing one’s profession (66%) and spouse (61%).Asian Americans have a pervasive belief in the rewards of hard work. Nearly seven-in-ten (69%) say people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard, a view shared by a somewhat smaller share of the American public as a whole (58%). And fully 93% of Asian Americans describe members of their country of origin group as “very hardworking”; just 57% say the same about Americans as a whole.By their own lights, Asian Americans sometimes go overboard in stressing hard work. Nearly four-in-ten (39%) say that Asian-American parents from their country of origin subgroup put too much pressure on their children to do well in school. Just 9% say the same about all American parents. On the flip-side of the same coin, about six-in-ten Asian Americans say American parents put too little pressure on their children to succeed in school, while just 9% say the same about Asian-American parents. (The publication last year of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a comic memoir about strict parenting by Yale Law Professor Amy Chua, the daughter of immigrants, triggered a spirited debate about cultural differences in parenting norms.)The immigration wave from Asia has occurred at a time when the largest sending countries have experienced dramatic gains in their standards of living. But few Asian immigrants are looking over their shoulders with regret. Just 12% say that if they had to do it all over again, they would remain in their country of origin. And by lopsided margins, Asian Americans say the U.S. is preferable to their country of origin in such realms as providing economic opportunity, political and religious freedoms, and good conditions for raising children. Respondents rated their country of origin as being superior on just one of seven measures tested in the survey—strength of family ties.(The survey was conducted only among Asian Americans currently living in the U.S. As is the case with all immigration waves, a portion of those who came to the U.S. from Asia in recent decades have chosen to return to their country of origin. However, return migration rates are estimated to be lower for immigrants from Asia than for other immigrants, and naturalization rates—that is, the share of eligible immigrants who become U.S. citizens—are higher. For more details, see Chapter 1.)Asians in the U.S. and in AsiaWhen findings from this survey are compared with recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project among Asians in major Asian countries, a mixed picture emerges. For example, adults living in China are more satisfied with the way things are going in their country than Chinese Americans are with the way things are going in the United States. By contrast, the publics of India and Japan have a more downbeat view of the way things are going in their countries than their counterpart groups do about the U.S.Across the board, however, U.S. Asians are more likely than Asians in Asia to say their standard of living is better than that of their parents at a similar stage of life. U.S. Asians also exceed Asians in their belief that hard work leads to success in life. And while many U.S. Asians say that Asian-American parents place too much pressure on their children to do well in school, even more Chinese and Japanese say this about parents in their countries. (For more details on these and other cross-national comparisons, see Chapter 4.)Differences among Asian-American SubgroupsThe Pew Research Center survey was designed to contain a nationally representative sample of each of the six largest Asian-American groups by country of origin—Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Indian Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Korean Americans and Japanese Americans. Together these groups comprise at least 83% of the total Asian population in the U.S.The basic demographics of these groups are different on many measures. For example, Indian Americans lead all other groups by a significant margin in their levels of income and education. Seven-in-ten Indian-American adults ages 25 and older have a college degree, compared with about half of Americans of Korean, Chinese, Filipino and Japanese ancestry, and about a quarter of Vietnamese Americans.On the other side of the socio-economic ledger, Americans with Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and “other U.S. Asian” origins have higher shares in poverty than does the U.S. general public, while those with Indian, Japanese and Filipino origins have lower shares.Their geographic settlement patterns also differ. More than seven-in-ten Japanese and two-thirds of Filipinos live in the West, compared with fewer than half of Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans, and only about a quarter of Indians.The religious identities of Asian Americans are quite varied. According to the Pew Research survey, about half of Chinese are unaffiliated, most Filipinos are Catholic, about half of Indians are Hindu, most Koreans are Protestant and a plurality of Vietnamese are Buddhist. Among Japanese Americans, no one group is dominant: 38% are Christian, 32% are unaffiliated and 25% are Buddhist. In total, 26% of Asian Americans are unaffiliated, 22% are Protestant (13% evangelical; 9% mainline), 19% are Catholic, 14% are Buddhist, 10% are Hindu, 4% are Muslim and 1% are Sikh. Overall, 39% of Asian Americans say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 58% of the U.S. general public.There are subgroup differences in social and cultural realms as well. Japanese and Filipino Americans are the most accepting of interracial and intergroup marriage; Koreans, Vietnamese and Indians are less comfortable. Koreans are the most likely to say discrimination against their group is a major problem, and they are the least likely to say that their group gets along very well with other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. In contrast, Filipinos have the most upbeat view of intergroup relations in the U.S.The Japanese are the only group that is majority U.S. born (73% of the total population and 68% of adults); all other subgroups are majority foreign born.Their pathways into the U.S. are different. About half of all Korean and Indian immigrants who received green cards in 2011 got them on the basis of employer sponsorship, compared with about a third of Japanese, a fifth of Chinese, one-in-eight Filipinos and just 1% of Vietnamese. The Vietnamese are the only major subgroup to have come to the U.S. in large numbers as political refugees; the others say they have come mostly for economic, educational and family reasons.Asian Americans have varying degrees of attachment to relatives in their home countries—likely reflecting differences in the timing and circumstances of their immigration. For example, though they are among the least well-off financially, Vietnamese Americans are among the most likely (58%) to say they have sent money to someone in Vietnam in the past year. About half of Filipinos (52%) also say they sent remittances home in the past year. By contrast, Japanese (12%) and Koreans (16%) are much less likely to have done this.They have different naturalization rates. Fully three-quarters of the foreign-born Vietnamese are naturalized U.S. citizens, compared with two-thirds of Filipinos, about six-in-ten Chinese and Koreans, half of Indians and only a third of Japanese.Korean-Americans gain top U.S. Army, Coast Guard ranksBy Korea HeraldHistoryAsian immigrants first came to the U.S. in significant numbers more than a century and a half ago—mainly as low-skilled male laborers who mined, farmed and built the railroads. They endured generations of officially sanctioned racial prejudice—including regulations that prohibited the immigration of Asian women; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred all new immigration from China; the Immigration Act of 1917 and the National Origins Act of 1924, which extended the immigration ban to include virtually all of Asia; and the forced relocation and internment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.Large-scale immigration from Asia did not take off until the passage of the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Over the decades, this modern wave of immigrants from Asia has increasingly become more skilled and educated. Today, recent arrivals from Asia are nearly twice as likely as those who came three decades ago to have a college degree, and many go into high-paying fields such as science, engineering, medicine and finance. This evolution has been spurred by changes in U.S. immigration policies and labor markets; by political liberalization and economic growth in the sending countries; and by the forces of globalization in an ever-more digitally interconnected world.These trends have raised the education levels of immigrants of all races in recent years, but Asian immigrants exceed other race and ethnic groups in the share who are either college students or college graduates.Native Born and Foreign BornThroughout the long history of immigration waves to the U.S., the typical pattern has been that over time the second generation (i.e., the children of immigrants) surpasses the immigrant generation in key measures of socio-economic well-being and assimilation, such as household income, educational attainment and English fluency.It is not yet possible to make any full intergenerational accounting of the modern Asian-American immigration wave; the immigrants themselves are still by far the dominant group and the second generation has only recently begun to come into adulthood in significant numbers. (Among all second-generation Asians, the median age is just 17; in other words, about half are still children.)But on the basis of the evidence so far, this immigrant generation has set a bar of success that will be a challenge for the next generation to surpass. As of now, there is no difference in the share of native- and foreign-born Asian Americans ages 25 and older who have a college degree (49% for each group), and there is only a modest difference in the median annual earnings of full-time workers in each group ($50,000 for the native born; $47,000 for the foreign born). The two groups also have similar shares in poverty and homeownership rates.Not surprisingly, when it comes to language fluency, there are significant differences between the native- and foreign-born adults. Only about half (53%) of the foreign born say they speak English very well, compared with 95% of the U.S. born. Family formation patterns are also quite different. The U.S. born are much less likely than the foreign born to be married (35% vs. 67%), a difference largely driven by the fact that they are a much younger group. (Among adults, the median age is 30, versus 44 for the foreign born.)There are also differences between the native born and foreign born in the share of recent mothers who are unmarried. About three-in-ten (31%) U.S.-born Asian women who had children recently are unmarried, compared with just 10% of all recent foreign-born Asian-American mothers. Among the U.S. population as a whole, about four-in-ten recent American mothers are unmarried. Even as births to single mothers have become more widespread in recent decades, Pew Research surveys find that a sizable majority of Americans believe this growing phenomenon has been bad for society. So in the eyes of the public, this appears to be a case of “downward assimilation” by second generation and later generations of Asian Americans to an increasingly prevalent—but still frowned upon—U.S. pattern of behavior.On a more positive note, U.S.-born Asians are more upbeat than the foreign born about their relations with other racial and ethnic groups, and they are more receptive to the growing practice of racial and ethnic intermarriage.Perceptions of DiscriminationFor the most part, today’s Asian Americans do not feel the sting of racial discrimination or the burden of culturally imposed “otherness” that was so much a part of the experience of their predecessors who came in the 19th and early 20th centuries.About one-in-five Asian Americans say they have personally been treated unfairly in the past year because they are Asian, and one-in-ten say they have been called an offensive name. Older adults are less likely than young and middle-aged adults to report negative personal experience with bias.Compared with the nation’s two largest minority groups—Hispanics and blacks—Asian Americans appear to be less inclined to view discrimination against their group as a major problem. Just 13% of Asian Americans say it is, while about half (48%) say it is a minor problem, and a third (35%) say it is not a problem.About six-in-ten say that being Asian American makes no difference when it comes to getting a job or gaining admission to college. Of those who do say it makes a difference, a slightly higher share say that members of their group are helped rather than hurt by their race. Those with less education are more prone than those with more education to say that being an Asian American is an advantage.Group RelationsOverall, more than eight-in-ten Asian Americans say their group gets along either very or pretty well with whites; roughly seven-in-ten say the same about relations with Hispanics and just over six-in-ten say that about their relations with blacks. Korean Americans stand out for their negative views on their group’s relations with blacks. Fully half say these two groups don’t get along well; while 39% say they get along pretty well and just 4% say they get along very well. In several cities across the country, there has been a history of tension between Koreans and blacks, often arising from friction between Korean shopkeepers and black customers in predominantly black neighborhoods.About four-in-ten Asian Americans say their circle of friends is dominated by Asians from the same country of origin, while 58% say it is not. Among U.S.-born Asians, however, just 17% say that all of most of their friends are from their same country of origin group.Asian-American newlyweds are more likely than any other major racial or ethnic group to be intermarried. From 2008 to 2010, 29% of all Asian newlyweds married someone of a different race, compared with 26% of Hispanics, 17% of blacks and 9% of whites. There are notable gender differences. Asian women are twice as likely as Asian men to marry out. Among blacks, the gender pattern runs the other way—men are more than twice as likely as women to marry out. Among whites and Hispanics, there are no differences by gender.Among Asian-American newlyweds, Japanese have the highest rate of intermarriage and Indians have the lowest. More than half of recent Japanese newlyweds married a non-Asian; among recent Indian newlyweds, just one-in-eight did.Asian Americans were once highly concentrated into residential enclaves, exemplified by the establishment of “Chinatowns” and other Asian communities in cities across the country. Today, however, Asian Americans are much more likely than any other racial group to live in a racially mixed neighborhood. Just 11% currently live in a census tract in which Asian Americans are a majority.The comparable figures are 41% for blacks, 43% for Hispanics and 90% for whites. (This comparison should be treated with caution: Each of the other groups is more numerous than Asians, thereby creating larger potential pools for racial enclaves.)IdentityDespite high levels of residential integration and out-marriage, many Asian Americans continue to feel a degree of cultural separation from other Americans. Not surprisingly, these feelings are highly correlated with nativity and duration of time in the U.S.Among U.S.-born Asian Americans, about two-thirds (65%) say they feel like “a typical American.” Among immigrants, just 30% say the same, and this figure falls to 22% among immigrants who have arrived since 2000.The Asian-American label itself doesn’t hold much sway with Asian Americans. Only about one-in-five (19%) say they most often describe themselves as Asian American or Asian. A majority (62%) say they most often describe themselves by their country of origin (e.g., Chinese or Chinese American; Vietnamese or Vietnamese American, and so on), while just 14% say they most often simply call themselves American. Among U.S.-born Asians, the share who most often call themselves American rises to 28%.In these identity preferences, Asian Americans are similar to Hispanics, the other group that has been driving the modern immigration wave. Hispanics are more likely to identify themselves using their country of origin than to identify as a Hispanic or as an American.Perceptions of SuccessAbout four-in-ten Asian Americans (43%) say Asian Americans are more successful than other racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. A similar share of Asian Americans (45%) say they are about as successful, and just 5% say they are less successful.Native-born and foreign-born Asian Americans have similar views about their groups’ success relative to other minorities. Recent immigrants, however, tend to be somewhat less upbeat in these assessments than are immigrants who came before 2000: 36% of the former versus 48% of the latter say their group has been more successful than other minority groups in the U.S.Members of the nation’s other large immigrant group—Hispanics—are less than half as likely as Asian Americans to say their group is more successful than other racial and ethnic minorities, and they are four times as likely to say they are less successful.On a personal level, Asian Americans are more satisfied than the general public with their financial situations and their standard of living. When measured against how well their parents were doing at the same stage of life, about half (49%) say they are doing much better, and a quarter say they are doing somewhat better. By contrast, only about a third of all Americans say they are doing much better than their parents at a similar stage of life.There are only minor differences between Asian Americans and the general public in their expectations about the upward mobility of their children. Some 31% of Asian Americans believe that when their children are the age they are now, their children will have a much better standard of living, 22% say somewhat better, 19% say about the same, and 19% say somewhat or much worse.On this measure, there are sizable differences among U.S. Asian subgroups. Nearly half of Vietnamese Americans (48%) say they expect their children eventually to have a much better standard of living than they themselves have now. About a third of Koreans and Indians feel this way, as do one-in-four Chinese and Filipinos, and just one-in-five Japanese. Overall, the foreign born are more optimistic than the native born about their children’s future standard of living relative to their own at the present.Political and Social AttitudesCompared with the general public, Asian Americans are more likely to support an activist government and less likely to identify as Republicans. Half are Democrats or lean Democratic, while only 28% identify with or lean toward the GOP. Among all American adults, 49% fall in the Democratic camp and 39% identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Indian Americans are the most heavily Democratic Asian subgroup (65%), while Filipino Americans and Vietnamese Americans are the most evenly split between the two parties.President Obama gets higher ratings from Asian Americans than from the general public —54% approve of the way he is handling his job as president, compared with 44% of the general public. In 2008, Asian-American voters supported Obama over Republican John McCain by 62% to 35%, according to Election Day exit polls.On balance, Asian Americans prefer a big government that provides more services (55%) over a smaller government than provides fewer services (36%). In contrast, the general public prefers a smaller government over a bigger government, by 52% to 39%.While they differ on the role of government, Asian Americans are close to the public in their opinions about two key social issues. By a ratio of 53% to 35%, Asian Americans say homosexuality should be accepted by society rather than discouraged. And on the issue of abortion, 54% of Asian Americans say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 37% say it should be illegal.About the SurveyThe Pew Research Center’s 2012 Asian-American Survey is based on telephone interviews conducted by landline and cell phone with a nationally representative sample of 3,511 Asian adults ages 18 and older living in the United States. The survey was conducted in all 50 states, including Alaska and Hawaii, and the District of Columbia. The survey was designed to include representative subsamples of the six largest Asian groups in the U.S. population: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. The survey also included Asians from other Asian subgroups.Respondents who identified as “Asian or Asian American, such as Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese” were eligible to complete the survey interview, including those who identified with more than one race and regardless of Hispanic ethnicity. The question on racial identity also offered the following categories: white, black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.Classification into U.S. Asian groups is based on self-identification of respondent’s “specific Asian group.” Asian groups named in this open-ended question were “Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or of some other Asian background.” Respondents self-identified with more than 22 specific Asian groups. Those who identified with more than one Asian group were classified based on the group with which “they identify most.” Respondents who identified their specific Asian group as Taiwanese or Chinese Taipei are classified as Chinese Americans for this report.The survey was conducted using a probability sample from multiple sources. The data are weighted to produce a final sample that is representative of Asian adults in the United States. Survey interviews were conducted under the direction of Abt SRBI, in English and Cantonese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog and Vietnamese. For more details on the methodology, see Appendix 1.The survey was conducted Jan. 3-March 27, 2012 in all 50 states, including Alaska and Hawaii, and the District of Columbia.3,511 interviews including 728 interviews with Chinese Americans, 504 interviews with Filipino Americans, 580 interviews with Indian Americans, 515 interviews with Japanese Americans, 504 interviews with Korean Americans, 504 interviews with Vietnamese Americans and 176 interviews with Asians of other backgrounds.Margin of error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points for results based on the total sample at the 95% confidence level. Margins of error for results based on subgroups of Asian Americans, ranging from 3.1 to 7.8 percentage points, are included in Appendix 1.Notes on TerminologyUnless otherwise noted, survey results for “Asian Americans” and “U.S. Asians” refer to adults living in the United States, whether U.S. citizens or not U.S. citizens and regardless of immigration status. Both terms are used interchangeably. Adults refers to those ages 18 and older.U.S. Asian groups, subgroups, heritage groups and country of origin groups are used interchangeably to reference respondent’s self-classification into “specific Asian groups.” This self-identification may or may not match a respondent’s country of birth or their parent’s country of birth.Unless otherwise noted, whites include only non-Hispanic whites. Blacks include only non-Hispanic blacks. Hispanics are of any race. Asians can also be Hispanic.Poverty is calculated based on the total population. For this and other reasons, the share in poverty in this report is not comparable with the Census Bureau’s official poverty rate. (Note: The report was revised July 12, 2012 to change “poverty rate” to “% in poverty” or “share in poverty,” and to add a definition to Notes on Terminology.)Ken Jeong

ORIGINAL QUESTION:“What would someone from 1700 think of our world today? . . . What would someone from Boston in the year 1700 think of life today in 2014? How shocked would he be about our world now?”This is a long answer to the question, but I will try to keep it interesting. If I fail to do so, you are free to stop reading it at any point. I promise to do my best to write very short paragraphs.I particularly recommend you not stop before paragraph eight just out of politeness. But do what you want, it’s a free country, despite appearances.Ultimately you will discover that my task was simplified when I decided to quote my source material verbatim rather than resorting to rhetorical devices and personal opinions.It is a very interesting question, asked by a deep thinker representing the high intellectual curiosity Quora is becoming famous for.- Je KaireLEGAL & PROPRIETARY PRIVILEGES ASSERTED & APPLY TO THIS REPORT REVIEWED & APPROVED for Legal Dept.: L.B. Shimerfsky, Esq., Gen. CounselEXPERIMENT SUMMARY - CONFIDENTIAL REPORT[NOT FOR RELEASE - DO NOT PUBLISH OR COPY]...Preliminary Studies of Colonial Time Transport Subjects, A Clinical Review of Social Acclimation Techniques - Team Therapy Assimilation Approach Ramachandran, Simone and Ford-Hu.At last the results of this experimentation can be revealed and published, following revision and careful peer review. Many thanks to the grants and project support received from The National Center for the Arts, NASA, Liberty University and Merck & Co., Inc. Pharmaceutical Division.__________________________________________________________________________________Prologue: In Boston of 1700, religious beliefs defined daily life and were the framework of local laws. People imagined they lived in an integrated spiritual and material structure, controlled by the Bible’s God, who demands worship in church. They commonly believed evil supernatural forces were active on Earth, opposing God’s will. This is different from the present, when we attribute alleged negative powers and intent to politicians and judges.“I refuse to barter my soul for thine modern science”; seems to be a typical comment from the British men and women taken from Boston in 1700, particularly if they lack a royal title or commission.(Of course, many Irish and Sicilian immigrants, and others, have since moved to Massachusetts in and around Boston; and it is common knowledge that attitudes held by Boston’s inhabitants since 1700 up to the present have changed substantially, along with the geographical layout of the City and its harbor.)Our staff, being people from our present (2014 to now), initially faced big difficulties attempting to convince time-traveling Bostonians of scientific explanations for the perceived magic of the 21st century. It did become somewhat easier, as reflected in the graphs and statistics submitted with this article, after practicing first on a few 18th century specimens procured from Providence and Bridgeport.Difficulties Encountered During Study: Most people from 1700, even well educated ones, express that life in our 21st Century seems to have changed in remarkable ways.This subject group overwhelmingly begins their preliminary session of interrogation and examination with comments attributing the changes to strange magical behaviors, objects and beings.Ask any when you first meet them, even after assimilation processes conclude, and they still generally resort to expressing such opinions.This is not an uncommon confrontation any longer, particularly near Beacon Hill, where meeting one of the clinical subjects of this study is becoming more and more probable.The overwhelming majority of subjects tested, perhaps more than 95%, resort to the familiar imagery of their religious upbringing to account for their experiences when transported forward in time, and conclude that they have been taken to a world of magic, sorcery, witchcraft and devils.They clearly don’t find a future of the sort they were previously led to believe would exist, prior to time relocation.Our observations demonstrated that those transported at first refuse to listen to non-religious explanations, even from their trainers utilizing empathetic modalities and patience.Adverse Reactions: Some subjects became violent and renounced all they saw; insisting the present is contrary to God’s will while calling out for divine rescue from the present, which they called hell. The more open-minded study participants allowed that it might be purgatory.No physical adverse reactions were observed in any test subjects transferred from Boston in 1700.It was determined to exclude from the study all results from attempted time transfers commenced between 2014- and February 1, 2015; due to an abnormally high mortality rate, even when adjusted for the shortened life expectancies of the New England population in the early 18th Century.Once the orientation procedure was modified based on further experience, records of recent transferees were reported and are included in the attached study results, and after life expectancy adjustments, demonstrate an absence of related adverse effects, as stated above.Overall clinical mortality rate averaged below 8.75 % per annum. Communicable diseases reportedly contracted from fellow time travelers was not deemed statistically significant in such calculation.Case Examples: After hearing our standard prepared orientation explanations from the investigators and staff between 2015–2017, and after time of the research analysts to reflect, this response was recorded as a typical example:“None here observeth the Sabbath. Many have I watched work on Sundays, as well as Saturdays. Sin is not recognized by thy people.”“Piety and dress in Massachusetts, if indeed that is thee location, are most strangely changed.”“Yea, the language ye people speak resembles our King’s English, but ye won’t use the English words as be proper. Thou spoketh many words not uttered in any civ’lysd English-speaking land. And ye speech dost not sound as those who cometh from any locales near Boston, but for a few words - save for that woman ye claim to cometh from Worcester. She alone sounds like she does, in truth, cometh from there. The wench is a droning babbler, as thou knoweth.”“Why doth thou people here speak a tongue ye called English, yet fail to recognize our most royal English king to be thine divinely placed ruler?”“Perchance some curs’ed crowd of Spaniards, treasoners, pirates and perhaps an unbaptised and distant nation of hottentots did overtaketh this full continent, even beyond Massachusetts and the several British colonies. Else I am surely within the environs of Satan the deceiver.”“Many here doth not looketh remotely like we English. More certain, their manner of dress lacks all modesty. Men weareth no hats, women neglect all coverage of the legs, else they dress in men’s garb.”“Before I depart I would be pleased to further inspect again the garb of thou woman from Worcester. I confess she today covers her charms with less fabric than a French harlot.”“A strange’r few of your people seemed as they carried blood mixeth with the westerly Indian tribes beyond Southbridge. And this queer ornamentation, most perculiarally the gold adorning that yellow-headed woman’s nostrils, appears stranger still than I might have conceived those pagan tribes to embrace”.“Perhaps the pope, in league with the Devil himself, presently rules Boston. I surely must hold my tongue on this spec’lation hereafter until I may determine if there may yet be God-fearin’ men who remain alive in this age.”“Nary a crucifix in this room or those beyond it appears. Some thing of horror surely taketh place in this building named thee “lab.” I fear yonder door may lead to my torture.”Only a few Boston time travelers were open minded enough to focus upon our attempts at explaining progress. A few-receptive freethinkers were very well read in what was then modern philosophy and “scientific” experiments; but even those few suggested Biblical explanations of the universe better explained the changes they observed in 2017.Their initial school primers were invariably the King James Bible, when any formal schooling had actually been furnished them prior to time relocation.In fact, most had memorized substantial portions of that tome.Our interviewers, not originally realizing this, were at first amazed at the subjects’ verbosity, their tendency to quote lines from the book of proverbs, and the subjects’ similar adept references to ancient myth.In time, the clinical assistants began to recognize the source matter being relied upon by the participants.Technical Considerations: Our staff didn’t originally appreciate, generally, how much our own confident grasp of our local environment, the laws of science and the complexity of the universe beyond our planet, depends upon a socially governed internal compilation of our early instruction and teachings, the electronic media, our easy unrestricted communications, plus similar contemporary experiences in a milieu we take for granted.Many of our clinicians found their participation in this clinical trial unsettling.If descent into apparent madness and attempts at suicide are to be avoided, after a traveler arrives here from 1700; we found that life coaches must convincingly reveal to our early 18th century travelers that it is safe to trust us to be their new teachers.Procedures were adopted to encourage each to believe the evidence provided by his or her own senses, leaving behind any inconsistent social or Biblical exhortations.It was learned by the study supervisors that a rigid process was required to ensure a higher rate of communication between study subjects and the clinical observers. Observers sought to convince the time travelers that each must learn to believe in the strange world he or she finds themselves in, like children in their early years.The process of adjustment for each traveler must proceed slowly and require very patient, full-time guides/instructors; and re-educate the time travelers as to how to function.Guides (referred to simultaneously as clinical assistants, or safe-keepers) must aim to gradually remove all physical restraints and instruct each participant individually in even most fundamental everyday activities needed to live normally as a 21st Century human, and how to interact with others of our age safely and respectfully.The determination of when it becomes safe to do this is best left to those who have been most in the immediate locus of the time traveler and earned at least a modicum of their personal trust.Conducting conferences with previously acclimated travelers from the same historical period and venue has proven to be effective, provided close supervision by clinical participants is constantly maintained and termination of the conference can be achieved without delay if required.Re-education will be similar to a parent teaching a toddler, and starts with the most basic tasks. Included were instruction for toilet training, basic sanitation, washing him or herself in a modern shower using modern soaps and shampoo, how to open sealed containers and beer cans, the use of ball point pens, electric lighting and lamps, microwave ovens, popcorn, GPS, how to cook and then how to clean ordinary plastic tableware and dishes without melting anything; not to attempt the cleaning and recycling of paper plates and cups; and how to make coffee on our office dispenser and why we drink it.Goals and Techniques: We must learn, and did endeavor, to teach all the terminology describing our twenty-first century activities and products, none of which the time travelers had previously experienced.Maintaining the trust and understanding of time travelers seems to consistently require a slow education program, and initial restraint from their premature entry into our current social milieu. Exceptions have been proven to be potentially fatal to both time travelers and individuals in contact with them, whether intentionally or by random encounters.A qualified security contingent should be budgeted for all such experiments.A critical acceptance goal sought by the safe-keepers was to gain the study participant’s acquiescence to clinician’s administration of medicines, vitamin supplements, intravenous lines and other needed assistance prescribed by supervising physicians and study supervisors. It was common to encounter initial resistance based upon beliefs that magical potions and charms were being injected into their bodies by their guardians.Eventually such objections were overcome and expressions of gratitude evidenced many of the clinical subjects’ appreciation of the good intent of their safe-keepers; and disclosure and consent documentation was uniformly obtained from each clinical subject via digital thumbprint.Even modern speech and written English, including modern accents, standard speaking construction, contractions, which words have become archaic, as well as the meanings of common phrases when the idiom appears to be some strange code known only to “modern people,” will be difficult and entail many errors. It is a daunting task for a time traveler to learn enough not to be seen as a freak or imbecile by strangers.We learned that it requires an around-the-clock working group to patiently walk the transported man or woman through his or her re-education without mental collapse, severe depression or paranoia. Of course, there must be Zoloft and Paxil, always ready for administration, for compliance with the ethical standards applying to this type of research.Those abducting someone from the 17th century, or inducing one to travel to 2017, had better prepare to shoulder this responsibility. Investigators and their clinical staff should be obliged to provide for unanticipated reactions and special needs.A pre=planned trip to Fenway Park may inspire the same infusion of hope for the future observed in present-day Bostonians. It has been a therapeutic technique preparing for social integration. We have not expanded this step to include Boston professional hockey matches, the clinical management having not reached an accord on such seasonal expansion of the integration process.But be prepared. Instead of the “moderns” being thought of as super-intelligent and beneficial teachers providing delighting experiences, our future subjects from the past will almost certainly hate those who removed them from a comfortable, familiar world, friends and family (all who now must be explained to be long ago dead).Many travelers to date have complained it grossly unfair that they were the subject of a pointless, inhumane experiment by insensitive captors, as absurd as that appears to anyone privileged to be alive in our present age. Malcontents insisted they did not deserve to suffer our retraining and the prospect of release into a world from which they would never escape.Ridiculously, they seemed to most frequently complain that any purpose to life, previously assumed to exist, had vanished. Analysis of such a subjective response could not effectively be performed within the protocols of our experiment.Despite such attitudes occasionally expressed by clinical subjects, each time traveler was instructed carefully towards eventual attainment of the skillset of an average graduate of a Boston Junior High School; then provided with an appointment to see a counselor at the Massachusetts State job placement service; furnished with prescriptions for anti-depressant and anti-psychotic pharmaceuticals, as necessary; provided with an address for a local physician who was prepared to regularly review their adjustment to the new life they would lead and prescribe further medications; and enrolled in a nearby Health Maintenance Organization for six months, prepaid.Conclusions Mid-Experiment: From our experiments, a few conclusions were drawn worthy of note below in this proprietary academic journal.We have no right to consider these time travelers foolish or ignorant. Those who lived around Boston then were only products of their age. Anyone probably would have the same beliefs if raised there then.This kind of time travel seems adequately safe and in compliance with all ethical considerations. All moral and ethical implications were adopted as suggested by a representative of the National Institute of Health, who was later hired as full time advisor for the testing firm operating this testing program.Further extension of the testing is recommended to further operate the test subject experiments and to report later on the follow-up of all test subjects we assisted, as deemed feasible, pending receipt of further grant funding for extending the program.We predict our intervention will eventually be understood universally by all subjects to be the kindness and intellectual opportunity it is, as originally designed by the planners and sponsors of our experimental study.This study must proceed and increase the numbers of subjects under study in accord with our originally submitted clinical plans, to ensure the beneficial results.Ashis P. Ramachandran, PhD., Professor, M.I.T.Gustave Augustus Simone, PhD., Assoc. Professor, Hofstra UniversityMarilu Ford-Hu, PhD., Dean, Dept. of Histore, Universite du Quebec & Montreal