2003 Japan Prize Winners Announced

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"

Comments

Japan Prize

[Anonymous Coward]

I am curious as to the origin of the name of this prize (and too lazy to click the link :P).

Outdated garbage

[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Re:Outdated garbage

[spoonboy42]

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.

Re:Outdated garbage

[sgt_sloth]

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.

Re:Outdated garbage

[k98sven]

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.

The latter, of course, being Jan Hendrik Schön.

And the prize is...

[$$$$$exyGal]

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

I had a TA...

[Erwos]

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

Re:I had a TA...

[Mr. Slippery]

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.

Re:I had a TA...

[Anonymous Coward]

She wouldn't be named svetlana by any chance?

ironically (or, sadly)

[lingqi]

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)

Re:ironically (or, sadly)

[zhiwenchong]

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)

[zhiwenchong]

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)."

Re:ironically (or, sadly)

[jpetts]

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.

Re:ironically (or, sadly)

[Anonymous Coward]

"I hear that you are always forced (peer pressure?) to donate away your award (Nobel, anyway)"

In such situations one simply donates to a charity that they control and can benefit from.

Re:ironically (or, sadly)

[dragons_flight]

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, 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)

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

Re:ironically (or, sadly)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

As another random fact, Nobel didn't set up an economics prize either. It's actually "The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel".

Re:ironically (or, sadly)

[bagsc]

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.

Re:ironically (or, sadly)

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, Nobel was a lifelong batchelor

Batchelor? Is that when you batch-process women?

Re:ironically (or, sadly)

[Anonymous Coward]

Mathematics has the fields medal which is actually more prestigious in a way since its awarded only once every four years and must go to someone who accomplished something significant in a field of mathematics while still under the tender age of 40 (or 35, I really havn't double checked this).

Also, I've heard the rumour about Nobel's wife being seduced away by a famous mathematicien of the day but I also recall someone (possibly my physics professor) saying that this rumour was entirely unfounded. The real reason there is no nobel price in mathematics was simply that it was not an area he was interested in.

Re:ironically (or, sadly)

[Anonymous Coward]

To my understanding there is not Nobel Prize in mathetmatics because according to Alfred Nobel it doesn't effect the progress of society... something along those lines, although that could be the reason he came up with for whatever personal resons he may have had. For the most part though the Nobel Prize goes to fields like Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, Physics, etc - fields that contribute to how quality of life... or something

Finally

[MacGoldstein]

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

[boomgopher]

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.

Re:And the winner is...

[noshellswill]

Too bad the discovery of "chaos" was made in the 11th century by a European monk "calculating" the effects of sin on salvation. He discovered sin pays! So much for Japan.

What about the video game companies?

[SteweyGriffin]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

spurn: v.
1. Reject with contempt

Might you mean spur?

Re:What about the video game companies?

[Anonymous Coward]

spawn?

Re:What about the video game companies?

[kindofblue]

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.

Re:What about the video game companies?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fund donated by Mr. Konosuke Matsushita, and his company don't want to give any prise such a innovative company like Sony.
What is JSTF

Re:What about the video game companies?

[Monkelectric]

Oh please ... I am a videogame junkie but they are not advances in science :)

Re:What about the video game companies?

[Samir Gupta]

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.

Re:What about the video game companies?

[kawaldeep]

for some really cool ``sound animation'' presented at SIGGRAPH this year, check out James O'Brien's research

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

Re:What about the video game companies?

[Ryu2]

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.

Re:What about the video game companies?

[gl4ss]

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..

Re:What about the video game companies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there were hardware-accelerated 3D using Goraud-shaded polygons in the 70's, before SGI existed. And they actually had quite large frame buffers. But they pushed around 25k polys per second.

Evans&Sutherland is one of those companies that have(barely) survived.

Re:What about the video game companies?

[david duncan scott]

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.

This Explains the Latest StrongBad Email

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

Perhaps this explains the lastest "Japanimation" 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?

Re:This Explains the Latest StrongBad Email

[Maria D]

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 is an author who extensively uses fractals and chaos theory metaphors in education research.

Re:This Explains the Latest StrongBad Email

[Maria D]

Thanks, I could use some adrenaline to wake up. Who needs coffee with helpful folks like that? :-)))

Japan Prize?

[dirvish]

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?

Re:Japan Prize?

[ElJefe]

The Fields Medal is basically the Nobel Prize for Mathematics (since there is no Nobel Prize in that category). It's awarded every four years. Mathworld has some more info.

Lame Washington Post Article

[Thomas Wendell]

The Washington Post article 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?

Re:Lame Washington Post Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Washington post is also read by non-slasdotters. If someone's interest is kindled by the article to look into Chaos, it is worth the piece.

After The Nobel Prize ?

[tealover]

Really?

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

You're still a loser.

Re:After The Nobel Prize ?

[smart.id]

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.

Re:After The Nobel Prize ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, unlike you who couldnt make it to the competition.

Re:After The Nobel Prize ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, this depends on who you talk to, and what their priorities are.

No... no it doesn't.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't a troll! It was obviously flamebait or offtopic, but not a troll.

Inspirations

[mestoph]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

The citation 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 played compared to Yorke and a likely reason why Feigenbaum wasn't included in this prize?

See also The Feigenbaum Discovery and of course James Gleick's book Chaos.

Re:What about Feigenbaum?

[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

[Charles Dodgeson]

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.

Re:Hype instead of the real science

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you say a little more about this? I read the Chaos book and implemented little programs to draw the pretty pictures (fractals, strange attractors, you know) back when that was the popular thing to do, but never saw the point of chaos theory beyond that.

As far as I understand it, chaos theory says small fluctuations in the input result in huge effects on the output. So you can't predict anything... oh, well. Too bad.

So aside from selling lots of T-shirts with pretty pictures, what's the point? Tell me about this real science you speak of.

Re:Hype instead of the real science

[Charles Dodgeson]

Could you say a little more about this? [...] As far as I understand it, chaos theory says small fluctuations in the input result in huge effects on the output. So you can't predict anything... oh, well.

That is one of the (several) popular misconceptions. Technically true, but still misunderstood. A large number of people (particularly in the social sciences) took Chaos as saying "prediction is impossible." While in fact, chaos did exactly the opposite. It says that some appearently random phenomena might have simple underlying models. An enhanced ability to analyze such systems means that more things can be modeled by simple deterministic equations, not fewer.

Another related point about prediction is the observation that the Sun, Moon and Earth form a chaotic system. But we can still predict moonrise and eclipses very well.

I've actually got a rant/published paper on the misunderstanding/abuse of chaos/complexity in one social science: Complex Rhetoric and Simple Games [300K, sorry]. It goes over some of the popular rhetoric about this stuff in one of the worst of social sciences where chaos/complexity was latched onto by anti-scientific people.

One nice footnote quotes the John Maynard Smith (developer of evolutionary game theory) calling some of the slogans behind complexity as "Absolute fscking crap. But crap with good PR". Now we here all know that chaos and complexity are two very different things, but they have become intertwined in popular lore. So the paper deals with both.

Re:Hype instead of the real science

[dragons_flight]

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 at UMD.

Of course the poor reporting is a different issue.

Re:Hype instead of the real science

[Charles Dodgeson]

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

[Gothmolly]

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.

Re:Nobel Prize = Political Soapbox

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but you have to understand that the peace-prize has very little to do with the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prizes in science are awarded by Sweden, the peace price by Norway.
Just like the Nobel prize in economy the peace price ain't worth dick, they are a joke.

Re:Nobel Prize = Political Soapbox

[Anonymous Coward]

Carter has been nominated before, and indeed one year he should have won the prize, but was disqualified because of some error by the Nobel committee. Thats why he didnt win it until now.

The comments made by the Chairman of the commitee, mr. Gunnar Berge, that the prize was awarded as a result of Carter's opinion on the irak subject, wasnt supportet by the other members. And infact he recived alot of flak from the norwegian press because of that sloppy remark.

Anyways, president carter was a worthy winner, and he didnt win solely because of his anti-war-on-irak stance, but im sure that it counted in his favour.

SIGGRAPH is for graphics

[robbyjo]

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 for details.

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

Re:SIGGRAPH is for graphics

[kindofblue]

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...

Order out of chaos

[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.

Re:Good article

[Anonymous Coward]

Pajonet? Angrymoose.org is far, far better. And since this is about the Japan prize, it has some relevance.

Jurassic Park

[tetro]

Wasn't the guy who made up chaos theory in Jurassic Park?

Re:Jurassic Park

[Mephistopholies]

Jeff Goldblum


http://us.imdb.com/Name?Goldblum,+Jeff
as compared to
http://www.ipst.umd.edu/~yorke/ [Jeff York]

And yeah I know it was meant to be funny... but it didn't strike me so.

sounds like they have problems with poverty...

[fantomas]

"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.

Seichi Ogawa

[BigBadBri]

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!

Re:Seichi Ogawa

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the proper phrasing would be:

Domo arigato Dr. Ogawa-san!

Your local neighborhhod Spidey,

Spidey-man

Talk about garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if the nobel prize is more recent I refuse to acknowledge any prize given to people like Marconi and Arafat. Marconi claimed to have invented radio, though it was Tesla, and the award was given AFTER Marconi was found to be a fraude. And Arafat, well, I think we can all see how derserving he is of a peace prize.

Glad Dr. Yorke won it.

[Bobo_The_Boinger]

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. 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.

A Sound of Thunder coming soon...

[john82]

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" 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 to Yahoo's page about the movie with much more info.

A Haiku

[slipgun]

I don't believe it
This story is up two days
And still no Haiku?