Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Swedish Mathematician Lennart Carleson Wins Abel

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the under-recognized-fields-of-study dept.

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."

8 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Young people today by gowen · · Score: 5, Funny

    Young people today. You tell them about a deep result in real analysis, and the only thing they're interested in is how it relates to their iPod. And get off my lawn.

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    1. Re:Young people today by LarsWestergren · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

  2. Wiki Article by zaguar · · Score: 5, Informative
    For those of you who want more than a press release, heres a start :

    Wiki Article on the Breakthrough

    --
    "Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
  3. Re:Except at some negible points? by gowen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well they mean "almost everywhere", which has a very precise meaning. i.e. except at a set of measure zero (finite or countably infinite set of points.) Of course, that countable set could theoretically be the rationals, so I don't know whether I'd call it negligible.

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  4. nice work, but no iPod by penguin-collective · · Score: 5, Informative

    The result he proved is nice mathematics, but you don't need it for iPods or audio coding. First of all, for many engineering purposes, it only matters that it works, not that you can prove that it works theoretically. Secondly, audio coding is done over discretely sampled signals, and most of those theorems become simple linear algebra in that case.

  5. Obligatory CmdrTaco quote on the subject by grand_it · · Score: 4, Funny
    His theorems have been helpful in creating iPod.

    No wireless. Less decimals than pi. Lame.

  6. iPod Reference Misleading by Chrononium · · Score: 4, Informative

    The iPod reference is completely misleading, as simple harmonic analysis is way bigger than just an iPod. It's merely talking about this guy proving that Fourier was basically right, validating harmonic analysis and expanding the horizons for signal processing. That's the biggie: signal processing, not the bloody iPod. The stupid article probably includes iPod just for the sake of hits.

  7. WTF does this have to do with iPods?! by pslam · · Score: 5, Informative
    His theorems have been helpful in creating iPod.

    Oh really? Search Wikipedia entries, the articles, all links - no mention of iPod except in those annoying side adverts. Why? Because it has nothing to do with it

    Credit where credit is due, and none is due here.

    If you want credit, how about: Shannon, Fourier and Huffman. Then there's all the folks involved in working out noise masking and all the oddities of human hearing that I don't have the names of.

    I seriously need a "No iPod mentions whatsoever" checkbox for my slashdot profile to pull some more signal out of the slashdot article noise.