I assume by "chinese professor at Harvard tried to steal the credit from Perelman", you mean the defamatory article written by The New Yorker regarding on Shing-Tung Yau. That accusatory article was written by an outsider with no regard to reality. For a correct account from within the mathematical community, see http://doctoryau.com/hamiltonletter.pdf.
While that may be true, there is no denying that Yau is a pretty divisive figure. He seems as interested in building his image in China and making the Chinese nation proud, than he is in doing real math. I can see why this attitude would rub some mathematicians the wrong way.
I noticed a few of articles on Hacker News has been about math recently. According to Google Trends, math is also rising in popularity, especially in US.
I think math is even more appealing to programmers. You are allowed to assume that certain things happen. You may define a set on the fly and all of a sudden, the set is populated without pressing a single key. Let me try, {prime numbers}. There, I got an infinitely large data structure. I hope HN doesn't crash after posting this comment.
As programmers, we put abstract ideas into implementations. Math seems to forgo all of that. Everything just happens magically as long as your mind can wrap around it and you have a precise definition for it. No debugging. Isn't this a dream?
So I am wondering if there's a community of programmers who have turned to devote their time to math. Like the video said, computer frees you from computation. Hence, it makes sense for math's popularity to rise, especially since we got more people interested in programming. Math seems like the natural next step. I don't have any hard data about this, just my intuition.
