viXra log

The Abel prize in mathematics for 2013 has been awarded to Pierre Deligne for his work on algebraic geometry which has been applied to number theory and representation theory. This is research that is at the heart of some of the most exciting mathematics of our time with deep implications that could extend out from pure mathematics to physics.

Deligne is from Belgium and works at IAS Princeton.

I obviously can’t beat the commentary from Tim Gowers who once again spoke at the announcement about what the achievement means, so see his blog if you are interested in what it is all about.

Update: Also today the fundamental Physics Prize went to Polyakov, another worthy choice.

Update: Some bloggers such as Strassler and Woit seem uncertain this morning about whether Polyakov got the prize. He did. They played a strange trick on the audience watching the live webcast from CERN by running a 20 minute film just before the final award. They did not have broadcast rights for the film so they had to stop the webcast. After that the webcast resumed but you had to refresh your browser at the right moment to get it back. The final award to Polyakov was immediately after the film so many people would have missed it. I saw most of it and can confirm that Polyakov was the only one who finished the night with two balls (so to speak). To make matters worse there does not seem to have been a press announcement yet so it is not being reported in mainstream news, but that will surely change this morning. As bloggers we are grateful to Milner for this chance to be ahead of the MSM again.

I would have done a screen grab to get a picture of Polyakov but CERN have recently changed their copyright terms so that we cannot show images from CERN without satisfying certain conditions. This contrasts sharply with US government rules which ensure that any images or video taken from US research organisations are public domain without conditions.

The 2011 Abel prize in mathematics has to John Milnor for work on geometry, algebra and topology.

His discovery of exotic smooth spheres in 7 dimensions changed the landscape of mathematics. He went on to solve the problem in all dimensions. This was just a small part of his total contribution to mathematics described this morning at the prize announcement in Norway.

A talk on his work was delivered by Fields medal winner Timothy Gower, you should read his blog for a lot more detail.

The inaugural award of the Chern Medal has gone to Louis Niremberg of the Courant institute in New York for his role in the formulation of the modern theory of non-liner elliptic partial differential equations. The new mathematics prize in honour of Shiing-Shen Chern comes with a cheque for $250,000.

Niremberg is a Canadian born mathematician who is renowned for his fundamental work on partial differential equations and their applications in complex analysis.

The Gauss Prize is for mathematics applied to modern technologies and was given for the first at the IMU conference in 2006. This years prize has been awarded to Yves Meyer for his work on wavelets.

Wavelets are sometimes called brief oscillations because they consist of a short wavelike curve that is zero outside its finite bounds. Wavelet analysis is like a cross between Fourier analysis and B-splines which combines the advantages of both. It can be applied to efficiently encoding sound, images and other signals and its impact on digital technologies of recent years has been enormous.

Daniel Spielman is a computer scientist and mathematician at Yale University. he has been awarded the Nevanlinna Prize for his contribution to information technology including smoothed analysis, a new way of measuring the complexity of an algorithm.

Stanislav Smirnov is a Russian mathematician working at the university of Geneva  on complex analysis, dynamical systems and probability theory. He proved Cardy’s formula for critical site percolation on the triangular lattice and deduced conformal invariance.

Elon Lindenstrauss was born in Israel in 1970. He has been awarded the Fields medal for his work on ergodic theory (the study of measure preserving transformations) and its applications to number theory. Using his methods he has made significant progress on the Littlewood conjecture which remains an open problem in Diophantine approximation.

Lindeanstrauss also proved the arithmetic quantum unique ergodicity conjecture of Rudnick and Sarnak which relates to modular forms. Many other unexpected applications of his work have been found in classical number theory.

Curiously Lindenstrauss turned 40 on the 1st of August. I am not sure if there have been any other Fields medalists who were over 40 on the day of the award. Presumably the official cut-off date for the 40 year age limit is earlier.