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Swedish Mathematician Lennart Carleson Wins Abel
William Robinson writes "Sci Tech is reporting that Swedish mathematician Lennart Carleson has won the Abel Prize on Thursday for proving a 19th century theorem on harmonic analysis. His theorems have been helpful in creating iPod. Prof Carleson's major contributions have come in two fields - the first has subsequently been used in the components of sound systems and the second helps to predict how markets and weather systems respond to change. One of Carleson's many triumphs was settling a conjecture that had remained unsolved for over 150 years. He showed that every continuous function (one with a connected graph) is equal to the sum of its Fourier series except perhaps at some negligible points."
I'm 31 and have recently started doing a lot of maths in my spare time so that I can get a real computer science and engineering degree one day (I have a degree, but it is CS light... now that I work as a programmer I know how much I'm really lacking), so it is nice to see that at least for some people the old saying by Hardy, "mathematics is a young man's game" isn't true. Carleson is 78 today, and around 40 back when he did the main breakthroughs he is honored for today.
Hardy's saying is a bit of slight against all female mathematicians too, come to think of it...
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
This is sometimes mis-stated as 'you can draw the graph without taking your pen off the paper'.
That's not a mis-statement in the case of a real function of a real variable. It's not that informative, but definitely correct in the sense that a function (real etc.) is continuous iff the graph is path-connected (i.e. every two points on the graph can be connected by a continuous path (and by saying 'continuous path' I have of course made the definition self-referential and thus silly, but it is still true)).