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

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

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)

[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.

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.

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?

[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?

[Monkelectric]

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

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.

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: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.

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.

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

[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: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.

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.

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.