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Fields Medals 2022
- ykonstant 4y agoThis year's Fields Medals should be of great interest for this crowd: most of the winners study concepts very familiar to computer scientists, while their methods touch upon the deepest, most intricate areas of pure mathematics. From sphere packings, prime numbers and lattices to percolation theory to information complexity to point configurations and much more. They are studied using representation theory, matroids, automorphic forms, real algebraic geometry and probabilistic methods among many other tools. People should check both the popular expositions in the link and the laudatio for interesting information. [paraphrased from a comment I made in another submission]
- echelon 4y agoI know the Nobel Prize has had its share of upsets, but has anyone ever been deserving of a Fields Medal but been over the age of 40?
- svxml 4y agoAndrew Wiles (for proving the Fermat-Wiles theorem as a consequence of the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture proof)
- khaled_ismaeel 4y agoAndrew Wiles.
- auggierose 4y agoThomas Hales, for proving the Kepler Conjecture both in a traditional way, and in a completely formalised way.
- wanderingmind 4y agoThis is the shortcoming Abel prize is trying to fulfill, more like a lifetime achievement and as others mentioned Andrew Wiles is one of the recipients of the prize
- mmusson 4y agoI do like that the Fields Medal goes to people nearer to the start of their careers than the end like the Nobel awards. I would be curious about, say, the next five people that didn’t make the cut. Is it common that they still go on to get a Fields Medal? Also I wonder if there was ever a joint result that led to both authors being awarded a Fields Medal. I can’t find one but strong collaborations are not uncommon, so…
- rcpt 4y ago38 year old math PhD checking in. Guess I missed my shot. Oh well.
- numerik_meister 4y agoI'm only in my late 20s but have managed to rid myself of the pursuit/worry/desire/envy of being a great mathematician. What I worry about now is how to approach the subject with my children. Because on one hand I do not want them to not be ambitious as younglings. But I also do not want them to experience the crushing disappointment of realizing they are not talented, as that was one of the hardest bitter pills of my life.
- nindalf 4y agoWhen I read things like this I feel happy that I went to high school with some truly extraordinary people. I already grew up knowing I wasn’t that talented compared to the real talented people. Now I’m at peace with being just a person. I don’t expect more from myself than just trying my best. I only get disappointed if my effort is lacking.
- noisy_boy 4y agoI had similar feelings of lack of talent when I was doing my higher maths/stats. Then I realized that I don't really love either; that realization prompted me to drop out and through a series of serendipitous events, I ended up learning computers. That is when I realized that I really love programming. And that ensured that I don't have any crushing disappointments with respect to the probable lack of my talent in programming; even though I am never going to be even close to being the best in the field, its fine - I just love it.
- rowanG077 4y agoHonestly if you are a mathematician you are already at the top of humanity in terms of cognition. Saying that is not talent is quite something. But I guess I can understand if you see yourself in relation to other mathematicians.
- nus07 4y ago
- peterweyand0 4y agoCan anyone give a little insight into how some of these discoveries can have engineering applications? There are some abstracts, but has anyone looked at this and seen potential uses in computer science? I'm surprised there aren't more comments on this on Hacker News considering it's the Fields Medal.
- hatmatrix 4y agoOne of the winners says that there are no concrete applications, but that some of the tools developed ("interpolation formulas") could potentially be useful for solving differential equations and signal processing, but doesn't go into detail. https://youtu.be/V8icZM14v6Q?t=119 https://youtu.be/V8icZM14v6Q?t=119
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mxben 4y ago> I'm surprised there aren't more comments on this on Hacker News considering it's the Fields Medal. Many would argue that looking for engineering applications in mathematics is not why mathematicians do mathematics. That mathematics does sometimes have engineering applications is a mysterious and beautiful side effect. It isn't the motivation behind doing mathematics.
- peterweyand0 4y agoOh I know. I just thought that more people would be excited about this and maybe point out where engineering applications might be possible if at all.
- hanche 4y agoIndeed, a possibly apocryphal tale holds that matrix algebra, while a beautiful mathematical construct, was considered by its inventor to be utterly useless. We know better today.
- paganel 4y ago
- atxbcp 4y agoI wasn't even thinking about that, but then I watched all videos, and in hers she spends more time talking about the war than she does talking about her work. I understand she's been affected but that feels out of place here.
- trhway 4y agoMarie Skłodowska-Curie, who got her second Nobel for Radium and Polonium discovery, named Polonium to bring attention to the Russian occupation of her Motherland - Poland. I don't see anything out of place with Maryna Viazovska talking about war as it may be hard to see anything more important than your Motherland, your people, being totally destroyed.
- atxbcp 4y agoYou misunderstood my comment. I said it felt out of place *here*, in a video dedicated to her mathematical work, hosted on mathunion.org (the clue is in the URL). Doesn't mean she cannot talk about the war in general. As for Marie Curie, I don't think they had Internet and 24-hour news channels back then. I don't need mathematicians to bring attention to the war in Ukraine when everyone is constantly talking about it already.
- trhway 4y agoBy then the occupation of Poland had been going for more than a century, so it wasn't about news. And in case of Maryna it also doesn't seem to be about news. It is her well-deserved chance and her choice to say what she thinks is needed to be said on such a momentous occasion.
- ykonstant 4y agoMaryna Viazovska received the Fields medal for her groundbreaking work on the optimality of the E8 and Leech lattices for sphere packings; she has been expected to win the Fields medal for 3 years now, long before the war.
- JacobiX 4y agoOne outstanding fact is the disproportionate number of fields medalist that went to the École normale supérieure in Paris !
- elcapitan 4y ago> École normale supérieure in Paris That's a really cool name as well, like "Standard Deluxe" or so.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoIt's in the sense of norms or standards rather than normal as in unremarkable.
- Qiu_Zhanxuan 4y agoYeah well getting into ENS Ulm is already such an outstanding feat, no surprise there.
- imranq 4y agoIt's interesting that the Field's medal award is quite a bit lower than the Nobel Prize's (~$15K vs ~$1mm) and is only awarded every four years, yet it still garners a lot of interest, speculation, and possibly envy from non-winners. Is there some kind of side-benefit to winning beyond the renown (which is probably a double-edged sword)?
- salty_biscuits 4y agoHave to be under 40 too, so it isn't really an equivalent to the Nobel. Maths culture is weird though, long held belief that it is a young person's game.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hanche 4y agoThere is the Abel prize, which so far has been awarded only to pretty old people. But it has only been around since 2003, so it does not quite have the weight of history behind it.
- LeanderK 4y agoI always found it weird how it was dominated by the french, with very few germans in between (only 2!). What are they doing differently? It's not that math is unpopular here, a lot of students are studying mathematics and every university has a math department. But they are absolutely dominating and I can't really explain it.
- atxbcp 4y agoIt is at least partially due to the education system: MPSI -> MP -> ENS Cachan / Lyon / Ulm. Very hard entrance exams to make sure they get the best students. Small promotion (IIRC around 40 students per year for ENS Ulm FIMFA) = homogeneous level.
- davidktr 4y agoFrance has an insane system of hyper-elite universities, the Grandes écoles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_%C3%A9cole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_%C3%A9cole). I have a friend who was in one, it's even crazier than it looks from the outside. We have nothing comparable in Germany. If that's good or bad I don't know, but regarding super-elite competitions like the Fields-Medal I don't think there is another way.
- LeanderK 4y agobut it's not the same picture for physics of chemistry, where we get our fair share of nobel prizes. It's somehow different for math.
- oblio 4y agoI can tell you why. In German 25 is five and twenty. 67 is seven and sixty. Annoying but bearable. However, in French, 60 is sixty. 70 is sixty ten. 80 is four twenty. 90 is four twenty ten. 99 is four twenty nineteen. Any French person is steeled by their crazy numbering system, from an early age, allowing them to reach the highest mathematical heights as they grow.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
- mintone 4y agoOne of the medallists went to (equivalent of) high school with me - seeing his name pop up was... a surprise.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]