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Science

2003 Japan Prize Winners Announced 99

Posted by michael from the good-deeds-going-unpunished dept.
dpatil writes "The 2003 Japan Prize winners have been announced. James Yorke (who named the field of chaos theory) and Benoit Mandelbrot (father of fractals) will share the prize for "Creation of Universal Concepts in Complex Systems--Chaos and Fractals". Here is the citation. The Japan Prize is right up there after the Nobel Prize and the Fields Medal. A good article on Yorke and his research team at the University of Maryland appeared in the Washington Post"
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2003 Japan Prize Winners Announced More

2003 Japan Prize Winners Announced

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  • Outdated garbage (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Chaos Theory? Fractals?

    What is this, 1985? Hey, I heard the Japan Prize for Best Album went to Duran Duran's Rio.

    • Re:Outdated garbage (Score:4, Informative)

      by spoonboy42 ( 146048 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @10:25PM (#5037475)
      Actually, the nobels are delayed significantly, too. The reason is so important scientific discoveries can be repeated and verified with a high degree of certainty. The extended time period also allows the awards committees to more appropriately gague the significance and impact of a piece of research.
      • Hey, I heard the Japan Prize for Best Album went to Duran Duran's Rio.
        Actually, the nobels are delayed significantly, too. The reason is so important scientific discoveries can be repeated and verified with a high degree of certainty. The extended time period also allows the awards committees to more appropriately gague the significance and impact of a piece of research.
        So mixing analogies from the original post, the delay is so that the Nobel commitee does not give an award to the physics equivalent of Toto or Milli Vanilli.
    • I don't believe it
      This story is up two days
      And still no Haiku?

  • And the prize is... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by $$$$$exyGal ( 638164 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @09:43PM (#5037219) Homepage Journal
    Each Japan Prize laureate receives a certificate of merit and a commemorative medal. A cash award of 50 million yen is also presented for each prize category.

    That's about 400,000 U.S. dollars. Science pays.

    --sex [slashdot.org]

    • ironically (or, sadly) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lingqi ( 577227 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @09:53PM (#5037282) Journal
      non-science pays more.

      Templeton foundation always offers a prize that's valued at more than the Nobel's (Nobels are about 1 million US dollars, making it the highest paying science award, I believe)...

      Worse yet, I hear that you are always forced (peer pressure?) to donate away your award (Nobel, anyway) if you are in the sciences; I think the templeton people keep theirs?

      Small side-note: Nobels have no category for Mathematics; but i think recently (last few decades) a separate foundation set up one for math with comparable awards. Something about Nobel (the dude) hating mathematicians because (unsure) his gf was seduced away by one, or some such (please correct me if anyone knows the straightdope)
      • The Nobel prize equivalent for mathematics is called the Fields Medal.
        http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FieldsMedal.h tml

        Can't confirm the Nobel anecdote though.

        • Re:ironically (or, sadly) (Score:4, Informative)

          by zhiwenchong ( 155773 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @10:19PM (#5037434)
          Whooops... the page says:

          "While it is commonly stated that Nobel decided against a Nobel prize in math because of anger over the romantic attentions of a famous mathematician (often claimed to be Gosta Mittag-Leffler ) to a woman in his life, there is no historical evidence to support the story. Furthermore, Nobel was a lifelong batchelor, although he did have a Viennese woman named Sophie Hess as his mistress (Lopez-Ortiz)."
      • Small side-note: Nobels have no category for Mathematics; but i think recently (last few decades) a separate foundation set up one for math with comparable awards. Something about Nobel (the dude) hating mathematicians because (unsure) his gf was seduced away by one, or some such (please correct me if anyone knows the straightdope)

        I am only quoting here, but Henry Petroski, the well-known populariser of engineering (The Pencil, To Engineer is Human, &c.) states in one of his books that the Nobel prizes were originally intended for progress in engineering applications of the recipient sciences, not for pure scientific advances.

        Of course, he is very likely to be biased, but he does make a good case to my mind in whichever book he propounds his theory.
      • Perhaps a lot of scientists do donate the money. After all, Nobel Laurettes don't generally have problems getting grant money.

        If you read Nobel's will [nobel.se], it seems he wanted the prizes to be awarded to people that "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind", and it is generally believed he excluded mathematics on the ground it wasn't practical enough.

      • Re:ironically (or, sadly) (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        An oft repeated anecdote, but snopes is to the rescue!

        http://www.snopes.com/science/nobel.htm

      • "Worse yet, I hear that you are always forced (peer pressure?) to donate away your award"

        I am going to guess that anybody who is nominated for awards like this isn't making do flipping burgers in the local MacDonalds... as poorly paid as the university environment is, I am sure that Professors Emeritus (and the like) get a little more than subsistence wages, and probably don't have too hard a time finding employers who might be interested in them. I get the feeling these folk are probably motivated by more than just cash... ("Screw your Nobel Prize! Phone me when you're offering ten times that much, and make sure it is Euros, cash up front!").

        At least, it would be nice to believe that they're not just in it for the money. I thought that was the role of large corporates and the whole patent-everything-and-close-down-scientific-freedo m philosophy.

      • The only Nobel winner I've ever met said that he paid off his mortgage and his bills, paid for his teams' tickets to Stockholm for the ceremony, and gave a small amount to charity if memory serves me. That was Eric Cornell from 2001 for the BEC experiments, btw, and he split it with two others.
  • who did this. She was teaching Calculus I over the summer. She mentioned she did Chaos Theory at the beginning, and I totally ignored it - I had no idea our fine university was doing any _serious_ work in it. Fortunately, I appear to have been wrong. Go Terps!

    And, for the record, she was a damn good teacher.

    -Erwos
    • I had no idea our fine university was doing any _serious_ work in it. Fortunately, I appear to have been wrong. Go Terps!


      Way back in my undergraduate days (perhaps before some of the youngest /.ers were even born) I had a campus job working at IPST as general office boy. I met Professor Yorke, fixed his PC one time as I recall. Not only brilliant but a nice guy too.

  • Finally (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MacGoldstein ( 619138 ) <jasonmp85@@@mac...com> on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @09:55PM (#5037295) Homepage
    Its about time fractal people got some credit. They've been used recently for everything from cell phone anntenae to benchmarks for PPC processors to models for Jackson Pollock paintings to realistic landform and plant generation. Fractals are surely one of the coolest things humans have made up (or discovered depending on your viewpoint), and I'm glad Mandelbrot is getting an award.

    • Re:Finally (Score:2, Interesting)

      by boomgopher ( 627124 )
      Although Mandelbrot has also been accused of knowingly taking credit for other people's ideas, notably R. N. Elliott.

      With that said though, this is an immensely important field for innumerable applications, so I'm glad it's being recognized.

  • What about the video game companies? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SteweyGriffin ( 634046 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @09:59PM (#5037319)
    Sony and Nintendo are two major Japanese companies who have done more to spurn innovation in virtual reality and 3D audio/video technology than any other institution, including the military.

    Playstation was/is the most popular console video game system to date, and Sony's Playstation II is a technological breakthrough.

    Nintendo changed the world with their release of the first 8-bit gaming system, and have since been working tirelessly to continue to produce high-quality, technology-amazing, fun-to-play videogames for folks of all ages.

    I wish more Sony- and Nintendo-like companies were on this list of 2003 Japan Prize winners rather than folks rehashing research from 10-15 years ago.

    • Re:What about the video game companies? (Score:5, Informative)

      by kindofblue ( 308225 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @10:29PM (#5037489)
      Sony and Nintendo are two major Japanese companies who have done more to spurn innovation in virtual reality and 3D audio/video technology than any other institution, including the military.

      No, I think that there are plenty of universities, that you can read about from SIGGRAPH conferences, that solved a lot of the fast 3-D mathematics and algorithms for texturing, and other high-speed rendering techniques, LONG before Sony or Nintendo ever got involved. This research is not a "rehash". Those algorithms are constantly improved because they are never fast enough. I think SIGGRAPH is the very biggest research conference of anything. At least it was about 8 years ago.

      Also, the fast 3-D hardware was made first by SGI and was pushed by Jim Clark, aka Netscape founder. VR would not be possible without fast hardware rendering. Then other companies, like ATI, Nvidia, etc made chip sets and graphics boards very cheap, for Wintel boxes.

      Also, 3-D games are not the most demanding for VR. Much scientific visualization is FAR FAR more demanding, in all the important areas. It requires more polygons, higher frame rates, higher resolution, and texture memory. These game boxes used the technology many years later, once it was miniaturized and mass produced. N64, PS1 and PS2 all used technology that was already very well established in the research VR world.

      Also, advanced dynamically computed sound algorithms are still too complex for game machines. The crap coming out of game machines is very primitive and sounds like simple modulations of samples and FM-synthesizer algorithms. But so far there isn't the same sort of hardware acceleration for these complex sound algorithms; at least not to the degree that OpenGL is implemented in hardware.

      • SIGGRAPH is the very biggest research conference of anything.

        Correction: SIGGRAPH is for graphics only because SIGGRAPH stands for Special Interest Group for Graphics. SIGGRAPH is one of ACM's special interest groups. There are a lot others like SIGPLAN (Programming Language), SIGKDD (Knowledge Discovery in Data), and so forth. Click here [acm.org] for details.

        Don't forget that we still have IEEE and other independent research communities. They too make significant breakthrough although often unheard of.

        • I didn't mean to imply that SIGGRAPH is for research on anything, but that it was the biggest annual research conference regardless of the field; e.g. medical, scientific, or technological research. When I first attended in 1994, with over 30,000 others, I heard that it was second in attendance only to some conference for Christian groups. Since then, CG has become even cheaper and more pervasive. I don't know about the Christians...

      • for some really cool ``sound animation'' presented at SIGGRAPH this year, check out James O'Brien's research [berkeley.edu]

        this is not exactly what you're talking about, it's computationally generated sound from 3-d animation, which is much cooler...and harder.

      • Also, advanced dynamically computed sound algorithms are still too complex for game machines. The crap coming out of game machines is very primitive and sounds like simple modulations of samples and FM-synthesizer algorithms. But so far there isn't the same sort of hardware acceleration for these complex sound algorithms; at least not to the degree that OpenGL is implemented in hardware.

        Where have you beeen the past few years? Every current generation console, and any new PC with a decent aftermarket sound card for that matter, uses DSP-based physical model or wavetable-based synthesis, with 3-D positional audio. The Xbox even has enough power to encode a 5.1 Dolby Digital or DTS surround stream in real time, on the fly, while playing a game.
        • the effects in modern games are generally just approximations..

          ie, the games don't really compute if the soundwave hits the wall and then bounces back and creates echo, more likely the level designer has marked areas where echoing happens, this is very crude, it's like doom had pre-set lighting. this is NOT the same as really computing it on the fly, like modern games sometimes do with lighting.

          in games the sounds tend to come through walls too.. ie if the tunnel you're in makes a turn and theres a monster barking right behind the turn, you hear it's place exactly, instead of just hearing echoing sound seeming like coming from the depths of the tunnel..
    • Oh please ... I am a videogame junkie but they are not advances in science :)
    • Hee hee... thank you for the vote of confidence. =) To the other responders who think that video games are not a source of innovation, it's getting to be less and less true as gaming becomes more advanced, and the gap between the first basic research and at which the technology becomes a mass consumer product is narrowing. I'm speaking personally as someone who has made the switch. Indeed, look at the other well-known research labs today: AT&T, IBM, Microsoft... they're the phone company, computer company, and software company. But yet, much basic science research goes on in those labs, even though the companies themselves are "application" companies.

      And more and more SIGGRAPH papers these days are coming from game and other entertainment related companies, such as Nintendo, Sony, EA, nVidia, Microsoft, Pixar, and more and more academics are switching to industry. Trip Hawkins of EA was a theoretical physics person, as was Nathan Myhrvold of MSR.

      Nothing wrong with that... a healthy partnership between academia and industry is what is very much responsible for the growth and pervasiveness of technology into our day to day lives today, and I for one look forward to it.
    • Nintendo changed the world with their release of the first 8-bit gaming system

      Do the names Atari, Mattel, Magnavox, Coleco, or Fairchild ring a bell? Hell, the Intellivision was a 16-bit system before the NES.

  • Perhaps this explains the lastest "Japanimation [homestarrunner.com]" of our beloved hero, StrongBad. Kidding aside, aside from steering about the Moon, are there other pratical applications? I saw how chaos could be applied to the field of epidemiology ... does anyone know if the CDC or private/university interests are applying chaos to these fields?
    • It may be a bit far out, but here goes :-) There are basic metaphors underlying much of human thinking. For example, ideas like "up is good, down is bad" or "time is a commodity that can be spent or saved"... Major scientific discoveries are hypothesized to influence such basic metaphors and thus all thinking. A relatively new example is relativity theory. An older example is the switch to the heliocentric model. I think chaos theory is a strong source of new metaphors entering all areas of human thought. Here [ualberta.ca] is an author who extensively uses fractals and chaos theory metaphors in education research.

  • Japan Prize? (Score:2, Funny)

    by dirvish ( 574948 )
    The Japan Prize is right up there after the Nobel Prize and the Fields Medal.

    How come I have only hear of the Nobel Prize? Am I just dumb?

  • Lame Washington Post Article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thomas Wendell ( 98443 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @10:17PM (#5037424)

    The Washington Post article [washingtonpost.com] mentioned is actually pretty lame. If you strip out the boring "real chaos" vs. "math chaos" jokes and the explanation of chaos theory that is pretty much what Jeff Goldblum's character said in the _first_ Jurassic Park film, there's almost nothing there.

    The article also mentions a Simpsons episode which relates to chaos theory, but didn't bother to mention that it was a take-off on Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder," a short story written in 1951, well before chaos theory had a name.

    Why is it that even the Washington Post can't scrape up a numerate reporter? Would they send an illiterate reporter to interview the winner of the Nobel prize in literature?

    • The article also mentions a Simpsons episode which relates to chaos theory, but didn't bother to mention that it was a take-off on Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder," a short story written in 1951, well before chaos theory had a name.

      Coinicidentally, the movie "A Sound of Thunder [imdb.com]" is in post-production for release in perhaps early 2004. It was such a great short story. Seems odd that no one has done the story over the past 40 years. Here's a link [yahoo.com] to Yahoo's page about the movie with much more info.
  • Really?

    That's like saying you made the playoffs but lost in the 1st round.

    You're still a loser.

    • Could you please explain how winning an award makes you a loser? What was the logic behind your statement? Your analogy is irrevelent. These people won awards. They weren't denied awards, and they didn't get "honorable mentions" or anything like that for these awards.

      A better analogy would be comparing the Academy Awards to the Golden Globes. Sure, getting a Golden Globe is great, but I'm sure most people would agree that an Academy Award is more prestigous. Of course, this depends on who you talk to, and what their priorities are.

  • Inspirations (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mestoph ( 620399 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @10:29PM (#5037490)
    You only have to look back into the past winners and there in 1985 is:

    Category of Information and Communications "Outstanding achievement in the field of electronics and communications technologies"

    Dr. John R. Pierce (U.S.A.)

    Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. Born in 1910.

    Dr. Pierce's achievements in the field of information and telecommunication engineering represent the highest scientific caliber in the United States.

    His work has resulted in the theoretical development of the possibilities of communications satellites and of broad-band digital transmissions via pulse code modulations and multivalent signals.

    Money can be a powerful inspiration, after all doing something you love is one thing, but you still have to pay the bills. And knowing, there is rewards out there, should you stumble on something great can only inspire you when your really looking into a dark dark tunnel with no light in sight.

  • What about Feigenbaum? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @10:42PM (#5037552)
    The citation [japanprize.jp] for the prize says (among other things):

    Dr. Yorke has found the universal mechanism underlying such nonlinear phenomena.

    Can someone clarify what part Mitchell Feigenbaum [st-and.ac.uk] played compared to Yorke and a likely reason why Feigenbaum wasn't included in this prize?

    See also The Feigenbaum Discovery [wolfram.com] and of course James Gleick's book Chaos.

    • Re:What about Feigenbaum? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Feigenbaum's paper "universal metric properties of nonlinear transformations" absolutely, utterly _defines_ chaos, for most mathematicians. this stuff is way, way beyond yorke's work. "period three implies chaos" is a joke of a paper.

      it's quite sad that feigenbaum didn't win the prize.

  • Hype instead of the real science (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Charles Dodgeson ( 248492 ) <jeffrey@goldmark.org> on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @10:53PM (#5037613) Homepage Journal
    There's been a great deal of real science around what has unfortunately been popularized as "chaos theory." But the hype and the rhetoric are almost entirely at odds with the real science. Yorke and Mandelbrot are not entirely to blame for the sorry state of affairs, but reading the prize blurb, I see that the misunderstandings of chaos are bound to continue.

    I would have liked to see a chaos prize go some some of the physicists who did more real and solid work in Non-linear dynamical systems, Lorentz or Packard or May or someone like that.

    Almost everything that is popularly believed about chaos is wrong.

    Sorry for the angry rant about this, but I am sickened to see that some prize is given out this way.

    • While there certainly are many other important contributors to the science of chaos theory, I find it hard to fault Yorke as a choice.

      He basically defined (literally) the mathematical foundation for chaos theory as small variations in initial conditions leading to arbitrarily large variations in final condition. Not to mention coining the word "chaos". He's been working in the field since the beginning and still does. Now adays he informally heads the theoretical branch of the interdisciplinary chaos research group [umd.edu] at UMD [umd.edu].

      Of course the poor reporting is a different issue.
      • I find it hard to fault Yorke as a choice.

        Fair enough. I suspect that my west coast bias was showing through in my original comment. I wasn't a physics student, but I knew some of the grad students in the non-linear dynamics group at UC Santa Cruz in the early 1980s. So I was learning about chaos while being fleeced at poker.

  • Nobel Prize = Political Soapbox (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @11:16PM (#5037715)
    The Japan Prize is right up there after the Nobel Prize and the Fields Medal.

    The Nobel people admitted this year that they gave the prize for former U.S. President Jimmy Carter this year because of his anti-war-on-Iraq stance, which they agreed with, in an effort to deflate President Bush's war machine. Jimmy Carter has done OTHER peace-prize-worthy stuff before, but was always passed over.

  • Order out of chaos (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is truly wonderful to behold whenever science illuminates previously unknown principles in nature. These men deserve applause for their outstanding accomplishments. Society still gives greater honor to professions other than science, but maybe this will change in the future. I doubt they'll ever be superstars like Dean Kamen wants, but then again, scientists egos aren't any bigger than anyone elses', so a little more glory won't hurt.

    I noticed that the Japan Prize also honored AI pioneer Marvin Minsky. Shouldn't they have included McCarthy as well? And when will they honor anyone from the cellular automata crowd? Both these fields have been pulling order out of chaos for years.

  • Jurassic Park (Score:2, Funny)

    by tetro ( 545711 )
    Wasn't the guy who made up chaos theory in Jurassic Park?
  • Surely Dr Ogawa, the winner of the other Japan prize awarded this year, is just as worthy of mention.
    It is his work that allows real-time monitoring of brain function using MRI - allowing researchers to map the brain according to function much more easily than ever before.
    Personally, although I think fractals are 'cool', medical imaging is IMNSHO much more valuable and interesting - big up to Dr Ogawa!
  • I worked with Dr. Yorke when I was going to UMCP. I also was good friends with his son in high school and was his roommate for the first year of college (hey Rob!). I must say that this is very nice. Dr. Yorke was one of the nicest professors I met at college. A funny guy too, always nice to be around, and good to work for.

    Of course I had no freaking clue what his work was really about. All I remember was his software used to draw fractals from mathmatical equations (here is the book with included cd-rom) Dynamics: Numerical Explorations [amazon.com]. His math stuff was always way over my head, after all I'm just a computer geek.

    When you hear about something like this, it is really nice to know that the person who won really deserved to win (not in a technical sense mind you, like I said I have no clue about that, but in a karmic sort of way.)

    Congratulations Dr. Yorke.

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