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."

Comments

Why so much later??

[Racemaniac]

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?

Re:Why so much later??

[Xest]

To encourage others. Even if it can't now be used for research there will at least be some people saying "Oh, so being a mathematician is a path to becoming a millionaire".

That will encourage some kids and uni/college students. It's an attempt to try and do something about the divide in society between the recognition given to sports stars, celebrities, manufactured pop stars, and other overly glamorised non-contributors to the human race who generally get lavished in riches for nothing other than being a fucking idiot publicly and the people who do actually contribute like scientists.

There's still a long way to go because you'll still get paid way more for nothing other than the ability to kick a ball around a field effectively than you will for curing cancer, inventing the world wide web, or sending people to the moon and robots to Mars, but at least it's an attempt at doing something about the problem of western society where idiocy is valued far more greatly than intelligence and competence.

I suspect this comment was on purpose

[blankinthefill]

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.

Re:let's start a giant math debate

[spopepro]

No.

From your comments on the matter I suspect it would be challenging to even begin to explain this to you, since it looks like you are interpreting "field" as "area". You're about 3 semesters of algebra away from understanding the vocabulary, let alone the purpose and function of these conjectures.

Note: this isn't meant as a slam, and you shouldn't feel bad (honestly!). Cutting edge pure math research is so far out there it's really difficult to jump in as an enthusiast in the way that interested parties can casually follow things like particle physics. When I was reading algebraic topology as a phd student (I flunked out... wasn't good enough, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt) I couldn't even begin to explain what it was that I was doing to people, even very smart people, just because of how abstract it all is.

Deligne is a huge mathematician, but

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Any matematician there?

[spopepro]

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.