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New Awards To Compete With Nobel Prizes

Posted by Zonk on from the new-kids-on-the-block dept.

Tsalg writes "The Nobel prizes will soon have company. Fred Kavli, a Norwegian physicist, is funding new awards in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience and nanotechnology. Kavli already funds several think tanks both in the U.S. and abroad, and intends the awards to help 'spread the word of science and get more students interested', as 'in many parts of the world that's a problem, from Norway to the United States...'"

4 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Re:He'll need all the publicity he can get by P-Nuts · · Score: 2, Informative

    To preempt the urban legend about the reason why the lack of a mathematicss nobel prize, see The Prize's Rite

  2. Re:Reward for Mathematics? by BitterOak · · Score: 3, Informative
    I just want to see a prize/reward for Mathematicians/math advancement.

    I thought the Field's medal was supposed to be the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics.

    --
    If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
  3. Re:Kavli Award? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Ha-ha - more than cheesy, he lives across the street from me. He definitely has an air of entitlement about him. (I won't say any more for fear of risking libel.)

  4. Prizes don't motivate as much as you think by agslashdot · · Score: 5, Informative
    Sciences are not the American Idol. There has been a million dollar reward for ages now, to crack the P-NP problem, among others. You see hordes of math & CS grads working on it ? Nah. There's no easy attack.

    Professor Richard Hamming was fond of saying that you can get money beyond your dreams if you solve any one of the 3 hardest problems in physics - timetravel, antigravity, or teleportation. Do you see Physics majors attacking these problems tooth & nail ? As Hammings explains, there's just no known attack.

    Americans aren't warming up to the sciences simply because they have a choice. Students get to decide what they want to study. They look at the difficulty levels of the subject, the job market, ask their peers & parents, look at career prospects & evaluate their "sexiness", and decide to major in English & Communication & Marketing instead. In India, where I come from, you simply didn't have a choice, (well, not until you were 18 anyway, by which time it was too late for most of us). You were asked to digest megadoses of math & science in high school. Hell, I remember working on some "preliminary math" problems when I did my Masters in CompSci in the US. The problems were ones I had previously encountered when I was in my early teens, in my high school! But the Professor said American undergrads needed that sort of thing!!

    You guys have a choice, so you study literature & photography & journalism & whatnot in your high school. In India, the only choices are math, more math & much more math. So I can comfortably handle a second order differential equation. But to this day I have not studied Shakespear ( spelling ? ), Rosseu, Homer ( not simpson, the pgilosopher chap), Keats, Byron or any other literary figures. I just know the names cause we crammed them for various "general knowledge" quizzes!

    Education systems are broken all over the world. In places like India & China, we get a one-sided hard-core math-sci curricula with no literature. In the US/UK, you guys get liberal arts with less math/science than what Bill Gates wants to hire.

    Prizes are not the answer (Nor is a $100 laptpop for developing nations). I don't know what is.