Slashdot Mirror
Pierre Deligne Wins Abel Prize For Contributions To Algebraic Geometry
ananyo writes "Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne completed the work for which he became celebrated nearly four decades ago, but that fertile contribution to number theory has now earned him the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. The prize is worth 6 million Norwegian krone (about US$1 million). In short, Deligne proved one of the four Weil conjectures (he proved the hardest; his mentor, Alexander Grothendieck, had proved the second conjecture in 1965) and went on to tools such as l-adic cohomology to extend algebraic geometry and to relate it to other areas of maths. 'To some extent, I feel that this money belongs to mathematics, not to me,' Deligne said, via webcast."
But in a fuller extent, I'm going to be happy to spend it...
The first Deligne number has just been assigned. Pierre Deligne's number is 0.
"Belgium" is the most offensive word in the galaxy. This is a declaration of war!
Where's my towel?!
'To some extent, I feel that this money belongs to mathematics, not to me,' Deligne said, via webcast, to which Deligne quickly followed up with "...but the money's mine bitches!!"
I'm wondering what the use of these prizes is. I thought most of them were created to help the researches, but if you only get it after you've retired, what's the use?
of course the problem is with newer research that it's hard to estimate its longterm value (and if there was no fraud)
but maybe they should just give these guys a nice medal, and invest the rest of the money in current promising research that probably desperately needs it?
... I feel that this money belongs to mathematics, not to me,' Deligne said, via webcast."
He then went on to demonstrate mathematically that "some" is less than "all" by grabbing the check and running for the hills.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I don't know if this was intentional, but I suspect it was: '“The nice thing about mathematics is doing mathematics,” Deligne said. “The prizes come in addition.”' Ha! Math humor is the best humor.
So I'm a software programmer and used to be a math tutor. My college hired me after I finished 18 week self-paced Algebra in 7 weeks. That's about all the further I get into besides Quickbooks and customer PC build quotes but this still doesn't seem right to me. Am I understanding this correctly?
Weil wanted to prove that just because an area has a finite length, that means there's an actual, real number of individual points in it? Um, if you think there's 1 million points in an area or line or whatever, make the points smaller and you've got 2 million for example. Think that's the answer, make the points smaller again. This is similar to black hole singularity theory. What is the width of a black hole singularity? Wide enough to exist but infinitely small besides that...in other words, not a value that can be expressed as a real number. The same goes for points in a geometrical area, so there are infinite points. How could anyone prove something that's not true at all? Or am I completely misinterpreting the wording of the stated Weil conjectures?
If that money belongs to mathematics, then we get to claim all HFT hedge funds as well.
Why can't these guys just graciously accept the prize, without claiming or implying they don't deserve it?
I dunno because their discovery was built on 2500 years of work by their predecessors?
They are only using integer coordinates. I do not know the math well, but I suspect that is why it is finite. Also, there are different sizes of infinity. For example, the "number set of all numbers" versus the "number set of all positive odd number integers".
From the article: "The Weil conjectures concern the points on algebraic varieties that have integer coordinates (in the case of the circle, x and y must be whole numbers). The number of such solutions — typically, there are only finitely many — can be calculated from a formula called the zeta function."
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Give that he spent decades of his life slaving away over complex mathematical proofs, he really ought use his well deserved prize money to buy
Hookers
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Deligne is a huge mathematician, but :
- Grothendieck give Deligne a lot of unpublished things, to be published;
- Deligne use it, but never publish it,
- Deligne made everything to hide it, and to let others think Grothendieck was fool.
Deligne use (for his only use) the tools given by Grothendieck, but hide and destroyed the spirit of it.
Even without this awful things he does, Deligne is on of the very big mathematician.
But mathematics lose a lot in this malversations.
Why can't these guys just graciously accept the prize, without claiming or implying they don't deserve it?
What he said was !=0, or twern't nothing.
The short (and flip) answer is: who cares? Certainly not the researcher, and neither do I.
But that's not very helpful, or easy for somone who isn't a pure mathematician to understand. However, it is frequently the reality of the situation. Pure math does not concern itself with application or any dirty real world situations (hence: pure). Algebraic geometry as a field of study was popular in the pure math boom at the beginning of the 20th century and then fell out of favor in the middle part as it was considered to be a dead field (this happens from time to time when practical avenues are all exausted, limits are reached on computational methods, and departments dismantle research groups either intenionally or naturally as interests are turned elsewhere). The late 20th c. saw a resurgence precicely because of high level computer science turning back some of the issues listed parenthetically above. Parts of the weil conjectures have connections to lie algebras, which are very popular right now due to applications to physics and computer science.
What? There is no doubt there is an interest, and even a large interest in computational algebraic geometry. But this wasn't responsible for the resurgence of algebraic geometry.
Weil formulated his conjecture by pretending that he had this mathematical tool known as (a good) "cohomology" (theory). He didn't have such a tool, but if he did, the Weil conjectures are exactly what this tool would allow him to prove.
The late 1930's saw the fall of the Italian school and Zariski et al started working on reformulating the foundations. Using the tools of homological algebra developed in the 40's and 50's along with the reformulation by Zariski and others, algebraic geometry saw a rebirth with Grothendieck who (a) layed the foundations of modern algebraic geometry in his monumental work EGA and (b) used the abstractness of homological algebra to formulate versions of "cohomology" which are suitable for the spaces one encounters in algebraic geometry. It was Deligne who was finally able to use this to prove the last of the Weil conjectures.
It had nothing to do with computers.
Weren't you?
Since "We're all the same", and 'Diversity is our strength", or so our Jewish 'masters' keep telling us, over and over again.
I bet you would much rather live in an all white country.
After all, it seems as if half the third world would much rather live among white people than THEIR OWN KIND...
The guy's name is "deligne", meaning "of line" in french, but also homophone of "deux lignes", "two lines".
Algebraic geometry is appropriately a great field for him.
I will cheerfully give him the ABA and account number for "mathematics" for him to wire the funds to.
JJ
Why is this not modded insightful??
Nobody can explain it to you because nobody really knows yet. It's impossible to know in advance what all the practical applications will be for a new development of this kind. When number theorists first started looking at complex numbers, they could not possibly have predicted that this research would eventually become important for electrical engineering and fluid dynamics.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.