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Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize
- vertbhrtn 6y ago"to focus fully on the world of ideas" - very interesting choice of words.
- ForHackernews 6y ago> He won the Fields Medal in 2014 Damn. I'm sure he appreciates the $3M (elsewhere he joked that he could finally afford to buy a house in London) but the Fields Medal is a much bigger deal in the world of mathematics.
- wmwmwm 6y agoMartin Hairer also has a software company making audio editing tools (https://hairersoft.com/ https://hairersoft.com/) - I love this Fields medal comment in the middle of an otherwise mundane support forum thread about MacOS compatibility! https://hairersoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2574&p=8222&hilit=Fields#p8222 https://hairersoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2574&p=8222...
- agent008t 6y agoWhich actually made me wonder - where/how do London academics live? I find it hard to imagine them commuting for hours from the suburbs - it does not seem very consistent with an academic life - but I do not see them being able to afford to live near their universities either.
- redis_mlc 6y agoFYI: How Stanford University handles that now is that they have a new subdivision on campus, and chosen professors are given title to a nice house. When they move later, they are given the assessed profit of any rise in house value over the years. This was necessary because house prices in Palo Alto are in the $2+ million range, which is not affordable to profs, and prevents them from the normal housing ladder investment seen in the rest of the USA. A lot of the profs use bicycles to ride the mile or so to class.
- conformist 6y agoAt Imperial: They mostly commute (but not for hours), because it's basically impossible to find a decent flat in South Kensington. It works, because Imperial has matching childcare. Also, many mathematicians tend to work from home frequently.
- asib 6y ago> I find it hard to imagine them commuting for hours from the suburbs... Why? It's as easy to commute from certain places outside of London as inside. For instance, it takes longer for me to get from where I live in south London to e.g. Kings Cross than it would to get there from Cambridge. The amount of time you save by living more centrally is probably less than 20 minutes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _Microft 6y agoThere is a 2014 Quanta Magazine article on Martin Hairer which I found interesting. https://www.quantamagazine.org/hearing-music-in-noise-martin-hairer-wins-the-fields-medal-20140812/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/hearing-music-in-noise-martin...
- dash2 6y agoOne thing I learned: he did his work while at Warwick. Warwick is kind of under-estimated among UK universities. It's reasonably well-run (which makes it almost unique), regularly hires smart people, and doesn't have the Brideshead Revisited hangover of Oxbridge.
- conjectures 6y agoCan confirm the stats department at Warwick is good & pretty active.
- chewbaxxa 6y agoWarwick is particularly well regarded for its mathematics department.
- ChrisKnott 6y agoI thought it was well known it was ahead of Oxford for Maths, second only to Cambridge and Imperial
- alimw 6y agoIt's my impression that rankings for mathematics generally put Oxford ahead of both Imperial and Warwick and sometimes even ahead of Cambridge. https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2019/mathematics https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/universi... https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2020/subject-ranking/physical-sciences#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin... https://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/league-tables/rankings/mathematics https://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/league-tables/r...
- Google234 6y agoThis prize isn’t too highly regarded. The physics prize has mostly consisted of string theorists giving it to their friends in the field.
- doublesCs 6y agoWhat an ignorant thing to say.
- dash2 6y agoCare to expand on why and give a correction?
- protomolecule 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441638
- mellosouls 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441242
- mellosouls 6y agoExamples of criticism of the physics prize: https://physicsworld.com/a/breakthrough-prize-criticized-for-rewarding-failed-ideas/ https://physicsworld.com/a/breakthrough-prize-criticized-for... http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11138 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11138 http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/08/special-breakthrough-prize-awarded-for.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/08/special-breakthroug...
- protomolecule 6y agoThey are all related to a single award -- 2019 (special) for supergravity.
- tantalor 6y agoThat's not what "scoops" means! A scoop is publishing something before a rival can. You scoop the rival, not the story/prize.
- dairylee 6y agoPretty common to hear scoop be used in this context. Maybe it's a UK thing? "If you scoop a prize or award, you win it." https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/scoop https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/scoop
- chrisseaton 6y ago> That's not what "scoops" means! It does in British English, and this is a British university writing in their native language.
- OJFord 6y agoI've never heard of scooping a rival - otherwise this is the same usage. A publisher 'gets the scoop' (a great story, a win) or scoops the story just as a mathematician scoops a prize.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoJournalists get a scoop on their rivals when they publish impactful news first.
- OJFord 6y agoI've never heard that usage before either. ('on their'.) Whenever I've used or heard it, the scoop is the prize-analagous story.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ambar123 6y agoYou need to be white.... To win these kind of awards
- markhollis 6y agoI wonder how prize winners feel about such huge sums of money. Especially that very succesful people who win such prizes tend to win multiple prizes.
- psychometry 6y agoAlso, what does a tenured professor of mathematics do with such a sum other than spend it on himself? It's not like he's going to build out a lab and hire a bunch of research staff.
- xiaodai 6y agoInteresting perspective. I guesss you can ask Roger Federer at his prime and other tennis players.
- foota 6y agoSome don't seem to care, which makes sense to me. It's not like people go into research math for the money. Andrew Wiles gave up their prize for the Fermat's last theorem.
- xiaodai 6y agoKinda sad that emminent mathematicians can only rent...
- mikorym 6y agoOh, it's actually called the Breakthrough Prize. I thought perhaps three of the Millennium problems had been solved, and the apocalypse were here. BTW, for those interested in P=NP and not so much in the direct mathematical research, one interesting way to approach is via hash functions. If we had P=NP, then hash functions would be more easily invertible (eh, left or right invertible). I think in polynomial time. Sorry for the "I think", this isn't my field and I try to find ways to reinterpret it.
- ChrisLomont 6y agoP,NP, and the invertability of most hash functions are not related, as far as is known. Most one-way functions of use are not known to be NP hard or NP complete, so having P=NP or P != NP would not affect currently widely used hash functions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_function https://www.quora.com/Is-cryptographic-hash-inversion-believed-to-be-NP-complete-or-NP-hard-etc https://www.quora.com/Is-cryptographic-hash-inversion-believ...
- proto-n 6y agoWhile not NP complete, reverting a hash function is in NP(), so it is very much affected if P=NP. () Ok obviously it can't be in NP as it's not a decision problem, but asking "is there a preimage starting with 1, with 1A, etc." _is_ in NP. From the it's trivial to generate a preimage in P.
- ChrisLomont 6y agoInverting hash functions isn’t in NP, except that it’s constant time, so it’s also trivially in P. Thus P=NP is irrelevant. It’s just the constant is large. Since each common hash function is fixed size, inverting them is fixed size. For a problem to be of interest regarding the P=NP question, the problem needs to have arbitrarily large size. 3-SAT can be arbitrary sized, thus is a candidate to ask if it’s NP hard, complete, etc. If we consider 3-SAT with fixed, bounded size, then 3-SAT is constant time. For example, inverting SHA-512 requires at most on order of 2^512 ops to invert. This is constant time, not even polynomial time. So no, hashing is not generally affected by P=NP.
- remind_me_again 6y ago"Imperial mathematician"... Star Wars popped up in my mind when I saw the title :)