New Awards To Compete With Nobel Prizes

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...'"

Comments

Re:He'll need all the publicity he can get

[pHatidic]

Did you know that the reason that there isn't a nobel prize is in mathematics is because Nobel's wife was having an affair with a mathematician?

Uninterest, Science, Math, and Understanding

[Ceriel Nosforit]

I'm told I'm studying Comp. Sci, but I think I've been lied to and that what I'm really studying is mathematics. I think math could be very useful to me, if I just had proper understanding of it. The other students I've talked to have apparently not thought much about this, and have skipped the entire 'understanding' part in favor of memorizing every example problem and past answers to tests they can get their hands on. I concider this practice fatalist, counter-productive, and in some sense cheating. They reduce mathematics to superstition, using formulas they have no understanding of at all and are unable to modify. They are aslo unable to create new formulas.

I decided that I'll have none of that, and set out to understand mathematics, first stop being the math teachers. My folly became quickly apparent.
They were doing the exact same thing the rest of their students are. They've memorized _everything_ without understanding what it was. How they are allowed to teach anyone is beyond me. They've created a scenario where mathematical superstition is passed down the generations like some bastardization of tradition. Any attempt to pick apart what they are saying results in fierce opposition as if you are trying to slay their holy cow.

So seeing that my teachers would be of no help, I decided to study math on my own. A year prior to that decision I would have laughed and concidered the very notion alien to all I wish to accomplish. - Study math?? Can you come up with anything even more boring?
It didn't take too long before I discovered Bertrand Russell and his Formal Proof; the foundation of "modern" math.

Thanks to Russell, you do not need to even understand what the formulas mean or anything of the kind, as long as your mathematical syntax is flawless. This for some reason gives free regin to teachers to hammer the syntax into students without them, us, ever knowing what it means.
We become, quite literally, educated fools.

If math was an intellectual island, this would not be a problem. However, math isn't an intellectual island so it is a problem. Math has become synonymous with a great many sciences, and today for example physics without math is inconceivable.
Yet there is no progress in physics without understanding, and math has become alienated to understanding.

It is no wonder that science does not attract students. What we are thaught is in essense to memorize phone books and rely on other people's solutions. What those of us interested in science want to do isn't to assimilate a mathematical encyclopedia, but to understand the reaches of space and time, matter and light, and ultimately ourselves.

"Know thyself", said the inscription. That goal is still as far above our heads as the roof of the building it once adorned, and at this rate we will never reach it. Math _needs_ to be understood, even if we can teach computers to automagically generate 'proof'.