Slashdot Mirror
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"
The Nobel prize equivalent for mathematics is called the Fields Medal.h tml
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FieldsMedal.
Can't confirm the Nobel anecdote though.
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)."
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.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
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.
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.
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.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
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.
An oft repeated anecdote, but snopes is to the rescue!
http://www.snopes.com/science/nobel.htm
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.