Pierre Deligne Wins Abel Prize For Contributions To Algebraic Geometry 55
ananyo writes "Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne completed the work for which he became celebrated nearly four decades ago, but that fertile contribution to number theory has now earned him the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. The prize is worth 6 million Norwegian krone (about US$1 million). In short, Deligne proved one of the four Weil conjectures (he proved the hardest; his mentor, Alexander Grothendieck, had proved the second conjecture in 1965) and went on to tools such as l-adic cohomology to extend algebraic geometry and to relate it to other areas of maths. 'To some extent, I feel that this money belongs to mathematics, not to me,' Deligne said, via webcast."
Why so much later?? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm wondering what the use of these prizes is. I thought most of them were created to help the researches, but if you only get it after you've retired, what's the use?
of course the problem is with newer research that it's hard to estimate its longterm value (and if there was no fraud)
but maybe they should just give these guys a nice medal, and invest the rest of the money in current promising research that probably desperately needs it?