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

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)

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?

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.

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.