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2006 Fields Medalists Announced
otisaardvark writes "The 2006 Fields medals, awarded every four years and described as the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, have been awarded at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The winners are Grigory Perelman (famous for the ideas underlying the proof of the Poincare and Thurston geometrization conjectures) — who declined the prize, Terence Tao (a child prodigy famous for proving there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes, but who works mainly in nonlinear partial differential equations and harmonic analysis), Wendelin Werner (a probabilist working on links with 2D conformal field theories), and Andrei Okounkov (who works on the interface between algebraic geometry and physics)." Yours Truly wrote to mention that Grigory Perelman actually refused his Fields Medalist, on the grounds that he 'doesn't want to be seen as a figurehead'.
Am I the only one who read Zonk's tagline and saw "I like meth"?
Something doesn't add up here.
I think Perelman declined the medal because his solution was so obvious. I mean, who among us hasn't proven those theorems while eating a donut and idly scribbling on our napkins?
As for declining the million bucks though, well, maybe "genius" is too strong a word for this guy. I think a much wiser course of action for him to take would be to accept that prize and donate the money to a worthy charity such as, for example, me.
It'd look like a publicity stunt if it were anyone other than our very own resident hermit Perelman...he's one of the very few truly quiet geniuses in the world.
TFA also says he's not too interested in the $1 million for the Poincare business...now that is insane. Sure, fame is a bit overrated, but money? At least he could buy himself a really, really nice hermit shack in the mountains.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
Alan Smithee. That guy makes good films!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
International Congress of Mathematicians... I bet that conference is a BABE-fest!!!
Fine. I call dibs on the $1 million prize.
... if it meant wearing scarves with your tweed jacket every frickin' day of the year, like that insufferable professor in "Good Will Hunting." He won the Fields, too.
--- I stand corrected ---
I know they say our generation is growing up much slower than previous generations, but calling a 31 year-old a child might be a bit excessive:P
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... having demonstrated that winning the Fields medal is possible, Perelman thereafter felt no need to bother actually receiving it, as the effort would have been redundant and pointless. Instead, he immediately set about theorizing a higher-order space in which Fields medals exist in multiple dimensions. He is even now working on an analysis of the connectedness of prize sets in the topology of the n-medal space.
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I went to Terrence's website on Standford and looked over his classes and homework assignments and I didn't understand ANYTHING. I guess that's what you get for taking a leet professor in a leet college.
One interesting note tho, he did say you will pass his class if you just show up, but your letter grade will depend on your homework, I wondering if that's how it works in a ultra high level class like that
Given that Terence's name is not Terrence, that Stanford is not spelled Standford, and that he is a professor at UCLA, not Stanford, is it surprising that you didn't undertand ANYTHING?
Experiment I: He placed an empty bucket in the first corner of a room, opposite to the second corner which had a tap. Then in a third corner he had some combustible material. His instructions to them were: "I will start a fire in the third corner by burning the stuff. Your task is to put it out." Well, both the physicist and the mathematician did the obvious thing when their turn came -- they took the bucket from the first corner, went to the second where the tap was, filled it with water and then rushed to the third corner and poured it onto the fire.
Experiment II: He then said to them: "For the next experiment, I will vary the initial conditions of the first experiment and you solve the same problem." He then placed the bucket, but now already filled with water, in the first corner -- nothing else changed. He then started the fire as before. The physicist solved the problem by taking the bucket directly to the fire and put it out with the water.
When the experiment was repeated for the mathematician, he picked up the bucket of water and emptied it on the spot, and put it down. He then announced, "I'm done", despite the now raging fire in the third corner.
When the psychologist asked him to explain, the mathematician said "Well, as you can see, I have just reduced the second problem to the first, for which I had shown there is a trivial solution.
In wartime... truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. (Churchill)