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)

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.

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.

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.