UK Mathematician Wins Richest Prize in Academia For His Work On Stochastic Analysis (theguardian.com) 21
Lanodonal writes: A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia. Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige. Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem. His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to "regularity structures," so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.
Hairer, who rents a London flat with his wife and fellow Imperial mathematician, Xue-Mei Li, heard he had won the prize in a Skype call while the UK was still in lockdown. "It was completely unexpected," he said. "I didn't think about it at all, so it was a complete shock. We couldn't go out or anything, so we celebrated at home." The award is one of several Breakthrough prizes announced each year by a foundation set up by the Israeli-Russian investor Yuri Milner and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. A committee of previous recipients chooses the winners who are all leading lights in mathematics and the sciences. Other winners announced on Thursday include a Hong Kong scientist, Dennis Lo, who was inspired by a 3D Harry Potter movie to develop a test for genetic mutations in DNA shed by unborn babies, and a team of physicists whose experiments revealed that if extra dimensions of reality exist, they are curled up smaller than a third of a hair's width.
Hairer, who rents a London flat with his wife and fellow Imperial mathematician, Xue-Mei Li, heard he had won the prize in a Skype call while the UK was still in lockdown. "It was completely unexpected," he said. "I didn't think about it at all, so it was a complete shock. We couldn't go out or anything, so we celebrated at home." The award is one of several Breakthrough prizes announced each year by a foundation set up by the Israeli-Russian investor Yuri Milner and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. A committee of previous recipients chooses the winners who are all leading lights in mathematics and the sciences. Other winners announced on Thursday include a Hong Kong scientist, Dennis Lo, who was inspired by a 3D Harry Potter movie to develop a test for genetic mutations in DNA shed by unborn babies, and a team of physicists whose experiments revealed that if extra dimensions of reality exist, they are curled up smaller than a third of a hair's width.
What Nobel? (Score:3, Informative)
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That sounds petty. Did he specifically state that no Nobel should be awarded for math? Seems not being included in the will didn't stop the fake Economics Nobel "memorial prize" from being created. Or did everyone on the Nobel committee have their girlfriends stolen by mathematicians? I am impressed, math nerds. I agree though that Nobel shouldn't dilute the brand by creating a ton of different prizes (music, athletics etc. the list can get long over time).
Re:What Nobel? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are no rich people willing to endow enough money to fund a math Nobel. Mathematicians might be poor but they are mighty arrogant too. They would not mere physics and chemistry to get some credibility rubbed on them from being associated with mathematics, the one and only true science. Arrogance of mathematicians is so well known it is documented by XKCD [xkcd.com]
Anyway the mathematicians are going to have the last laugh. All "science" published by the economics Nobel will prove to be pure random stochastic noise by this current work.
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> Please, tell me how you produce a falsifiable theory about a fucking economy.
Something to do with pareto optimising equilibrium utility allocations.
I guess you would have to have actually researched the subject to do that...
Instead you prefer to dismiss an entire field as unscientific without doing any research or investigation into it at all... not my definition of science.
Guess that's just you acting as if you were maximising your decision utility again... like a damn idiot.
Notes on some of the prizes (Score:4, Informative)
"an annual $3m award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige"
For those who don't know the field of mathematics there is no Nobel prize because Alfred Nobel's girlfriend was stolen away by a mathematician. And the most prestigious prize is the Fields Medal, even though it doesn't have that much money attached. It also has an age cutoff.
The Fields medal is the most prestigious award in mathematics because, um... because some group has decided that it's the most prestigious medal.
The Fields medal is awarded every 4 years, only awarded to people under 40, and comes with a CA$15,000 award. Any person can only receive the award once.
The prestige of the Fields medal is all good, but it seems like the prize money is very low - it doesn't really track with the goal of furthering the field. As my old boss once quipped, "ten thousand dollars will not change your life". High level mathematical ability is extremely rare, and maybe we should be setting these people up better to further the field.
The Nobel committee doesn't have a prize in mathematics (but economics is a related field), comes with a (slightly less than) $1 million prize, and can be given out multiple times to any individual - four people have received 2 Nobel prizes. This seems a little better suited to furthering the field - that much money would mean that the recipient can spend full time pursuing their research.
It also means that the recipient can *retire* after receiving the award, so it might be counterproductive.
We know a great deal more about motivation and psychology than we did at the turn of the last century, an interesting thought problem might be "how do we set up an incentive that maximizes the creative output of the recipients?"
I've often felt over the years that the Nobel committee has become so cautious and conservative that it only gives out scientific awards to research that was done 10 to 20 years earlier and has been proven over time. They're basically afraid of giving out the prize too early, in case the discoveries turn out to be not as important. This means that the people receiving the awards are generally at the ends of their careers, and the awards do little to further research.
They also gave one to Obama, for no apparent reason.
The breakthrough prizes are given annually, with a $3 million prize, for physics, math, and life sciences. (Life sciences can have up to 4 prizes each year.) There's no age limit, and people can win the prizes multiple times.
It sounds like the breakthrough prizes are better targeted to furthering basic research.
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From what I understand, the monetary award is seldom used to retire .. people who are best of the best of the best who get the award would usually invest the money back into their work.
e.g. being an imperial mathematician has the connotation that they already "math for maths sake", with no particular endpoint.
imperial mathematician (Score:1)
" being an imperial mathematician has the connotation that they already "math for maths sake", with no particular endpoint."
Imperial ? What Empire are we talking about here?
I don't think the Romans were into theoretical mathematics, nor was Palpatine.
And the wannabe Emperor currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is certainly math-illiterate.
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Re: Notes on some of the prizes (Score:2)
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It also means that the recipient can *retire* after receiving the award, so it might be counterproductive.
The Nobel committee has actually a fix for that. They try to only award people who are already retired so they can't retire again... (Last year, the physics prize went to Peebles (84 yrs), Michel Mayor (77 yrs) and Didier Queloz (53 yrs))
They also gave one to Obama, for no apparent reason.
That's not fair. He got the prize for not being George W. That seemed like a very important accomplishment back then... oh, those were the days.
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I've often felt over the years that the Nobel committee has become so cautious and conservative that it only gives out scientific awards to research that was done 10 to 20 years earlier and has been proven over time. They're basically afraid of giving out the prize too early, in case the discoveries turn out to be not as important. This means that the people receiving the awards are generally at the ends of their careers, and the awards do little to further research.
The Nobel is not like the Oscars which is given for that years best movie, so the que of worthy recipients quickly builds up. Only the most groundbreaking discoveries jump the que which I guess you could consider a sort of platinum-Nobel.
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He should have predicted this (Score:4, Funny)
This prize is not randomly determined; not having a random probability distribution, therefore it may be predicted. He should have predicted this.
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This is same Martin Hairer that created Amadeus (Score:5, Interesting)