Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/203853/imperial-mathematician-scoops-3m-breakthrough-prize/

by guerby • 6 years ago

152 103 6 years ago

imperial.ac.uk

vertbhrtn• 6 years ago

"to focus fully on the world of ideas" - very interesting choice of words.

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

He won the Fields Medal in 2014

Damn. I'm sure he appreciates the $3M (elsewhere he joked that he could finally afford to buy a house in London) but the Fields Medal is a much bigger deal in the world of mathematics.

wmwmwm• 6 years ago

Martin Hairer also has a software company making audio editing tools (https://hairersoft.com/) - I love this Fields medal comment in the middle of an otherwise mundane support forum thread about MacOS compatibility! https://hairersoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2574&p=8222...

19f191ty• 6 years ago

I think he us the original creator of Amadeus

dharma12• 6 years ago

Love that he is still answering customer questions on the Amadeus forum weekly

agent008t2• 6 years ago

Which actually made me wonder - where/how do London academics live? I find it hard to imagine them commuting for hours from the suburbs - it does not seem very consistent with an academic life - but I do not see them being able to afford to live near their universities either.

redis_mlc• 6 years ago

FYI: How Stanford University handles that now is that they have a new subdivision on campus, and chosen professors are given title to a nice house. When they move later, they are given the assessed profit of any rise in house value over the years.

This was necessary because house prices in Palo Alto are in the $2+ million range, which is not affordable to profs, and prevents them from the normal housing ladder investment seen in the rest of the USA.

A lot of the profs use bicycles to ride the mile or so to class.

conformist• 6 years ago

At Imperial: They mostly commute (but not for hours), because it's basically impossible to find a decent flat in South Kensington. It works, because Imperial has matching childcare. Also, many mathematicians tend to work from home frequently.

asib2• 6 years ago

I find it hard to imagine them commuting for hours from the suburbs...

Why? It's as easy to commute from certain places outside of London as inside. For instance, it takes longer for me to get from where I live in south London to e.g. Kings Cross than it would to get there from Cambridge. The amount of time you save by living more centrally is probably less than 20 minutes.

learnstats2• 6 years ago

I imagine that a knighted professor at Imperial can comfortably access a mortgage in London, so I doubt this applied to Martin Hairer.

But, post-graduates in London (if they have no other source of support) do tend to have a difficult lifestyle. Not recommended.

p-a_582132• 6 years ago

Imperial, on the whole, is one of the better-paying Universities in the UK, and certain Departments are able to provide considerable supplements upon base salaries.

The vast majority of academics with families live in the outer zones in London, or commute by rail from the suburbs just outside. London has a very dense and efficient public transport network, and therefore a typical commute time is around 40 minutes, and in most cases less than 1hr.

The price of accomodation remains an issue with younger academics, who arrived in London after the housing booms (1st surge around 2004, 2nd around 2010). Consultancy, enterpreneurship etc do provide good additional income streams for many, and therefore it still all makes sense.

More recently Imperial has been developing some of its own accomodation for junior staff and graduate students, which is made available at subsidised rates.

friendlybus• 6 years ago

It's somewhat common for London office workers to park at an overground station 30mins-1hr out of london and commute in.

dogma1138• 6 years ago

The same way that everyone else does; buying a 1.5M 2 bed flat in Zone 1 isn’t possible on UK tech salaries either, even if you reach the top tiers for UK tech pay which usually tops at around £125K base you aren’t buying central London properties either.

Symbiote2• 6 years ago

Is London compatible with your idea of an academic life?

A friend rejected a job at Imperial because he didn't want to live in a metropolis. Another friend stays at UCL because she can't bear to leave London.

_Microft• 6 years ago

There is a 2014 Quanta Magazine article on Martin Hairer which I found interesting.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/hearing-music-in-noise-martin...

dash23• 6 years ago

One thing I learned: he did his work while at Warwick. Warwick is kind of under-estimated among UK universities. It's reasonably well-run (which makes it almost unique), regularly hires smart people, and doesn't have the Brideshead Revisited hangover of Oxbridge.

conjectures• 6 years ago

Can confirm the stats department at Warwick is good & pretty active.

chewbaxxa• 6 years ago

Warwick is particularly well regarded for its mathematics department.

dan-robertson• 6 years ago

Basically since Warwick was founded, it had a reputation for being the place people went to when they were rejected from oxbridge. This sounds bad but one subtlety with the U.K. system is that almost all students may apply to at most one of Oxford and Cambridge in any given year and those universities tend to get more sufficiently good applicants than they take in. If one of Oxford or Cambridge is commonly considered better than the other by applicants then Warwick the distribution of the abilities of the rejects is higher than if they had all applied to a single top university equal in size to the sum of Oxford and Cambridge. Therefore Warwick gets to take in lots of very good undergraduates.

The university was founded in the 60s out of what used to be a research retreat for mathematicians. At its inception a large portion of its mathematics department (at least the topologies) came directly from Cambridge (I believe the story is that Christopher Zeeman went around his colleagues telling them that all the others were going to Warwick). And in the mathematics department in particular has been strong ever since.

I believe the course structure is also different there than from oxbridge (or many other U.K. universities) in that it is meant to be more like an American university with more choice to pursue courses from different subjects or with wide varieties of specialisation.

leoc• 6 years ago

Britain has a whole clutch of universities which are global research powerhouses but are scorned as boring redbricks (or whatever) by most of the locals and unheard of to most people internationally.

wenc3• 6 years ago

doesn't have the Brideshead Revisited hangover of Oxbridge

I've watched and read Bridehead Revisited. Just curious what aspect of it you mean here: the aristocracy?

jkaptur• 6 years ago

I don't quite follow what you mean by "Brideshead Revisited hangover" - from Wikipedia, it seems like it roughly means "nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy"?

melling• 6 years ago

here’s his paper that won him the prize. It’s long at 180 pages.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5113

Wish there was something between a Quanta article and the paper that described his thinking.

kkylin• 6 years ago

A quick search shows this:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.3014

which still requires a substantial mathematical background, but seems rather less technical (I've not read it). There's also a textbook on rough paths by Friz and Hairer with an introduction to regularity structures; if you're at an academic institution with access to SpringerLink, you may be able to get it easily.

Finally, Martin gives lots of talks, and he's an exceptionally clear speaker. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something on YouTube that's reasonably accessible to someone with a solid math / physics background.

mikorym4• 6 years ago

Wait, does he drink Rooibos at 2:32?

Google2343• 6 years ago

This prize isn’t too highly regarded. The physics prize has mostly consisted of string theorists giving it to their friends in the field.

doublesCs2• 6 years ago

What an ignorant thing to say.

dash23• 6 years ago

Care to expand on why and give a correction?

mellosouls5• 6 years ago

Examples of criticism of the physics prize:

https://physicsworld.com/a/breakthrough-prize-criticized-for...

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11138

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/08/special-breakthroug...

scott31• 6 years ago

So it is like Nobel Prize

namenotrequired• 6 years ago

Asking out of ignorance. When the article says that

The Breakthrough Prizes are the largest prizes in science

Do they mean the prize comes with more money?

protomolecule5• 6 years ago

Yes

protomolecule5• 6 years ago

"This prize isn’t too highly regarded."

[By whom?]

"The physics prize has mostly consisted of string theorists giving it to their friends in the field."

Firsty, the Breakthrough Prize is given in Life Sciences, Mathematics and Fundamental Physics. This post is about the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.

As for Fundamental Physics, apart from 2019 (special) for supergravity, it doesn't seem to go to string theorists:

2021 Special Breakthrough Prize In Fundamental Physics -- Steven Weinberg, “continuous leadership in fundamental physics, with broad impact across particle physics, gravity and cosmology, and for communicating science to a wider audience.” [0]

2021 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics -- Eric Adelberger, Jens H. Gundlach and Blayne Heckel, University of Washington. Citation: For precision fundamental measurements that test our understanding of gravity, probe the nature of dark energy, and establish limits on couplings to dark matter. [1]

2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to all 347 members of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration representing 60 institutions in 20 countries. [2]

2019 Breakthrough Prize In Fundamental Physics -- Charles Kane and Eugene Mele – University of Pennsylvania. Citation: For new ideas about topology and symmetry in physics, leading to the prediction of a new class of materials that conduct electricity only on their surface. [3]

2019 Special Breakthrough Prize In Fundamental Physics -- Jocelyn Bell Burnell – University of Dundee and University of Oxford. Citation: For fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars, and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community. [3]

2018 Breakthrough Prize In Fundamental Physics -- WMAP experimental team. Citation: for detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies. [4]

There are some string theorists further in the past, but they still don't warrant the use of the word 'mostly'. [5]

[0] https://breakthroughprize.org/News/61

[1] https://breakthroughprize.org/News/60

[2] https://breakthroughprize.org/News/54

[3] https://breakthroughprize.org/News/47

[4] https://breakthroughprize.org/News/41

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Prize_in_Fundamen...

Google2343• 6 years ago

Whom was me and others in the physics department I was associated with. You can find more discussions on the prize on the not even wrong blog https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8958

chrisseaton5• 6 years ago

This prize isn’t too highly regarded.

Wow this is an astronomically absurd Hacker News put-down.

mellosouls5• 6 years ago

See other comments for context. It was harsh, and perhaps a little out of date, but there has been criticism of the physics prize in the past.

A little moderation on both sides on this point wouldn't go amiss.

cultus• 6 years ago

I mean, it's not that impressive. I have like 3 of them.

tantalor• 6 years ago

That's not what "scoops" means!

A scoop is publishing something before a rival can. You scoop the rival, not the story/prize.

dairylee• 6 years ago

Pretty common to hear scoop be used in this context. Maybe it's a UK thing?

"If you scoop a prize or award, you win it."

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/scoop

chrisseaton5• 6 years ago

That's not what "scoops" means!

It does in British English, and this is a British university writing in their native language.

OJFord3• 6 years ago

I've never heard of scooping a rival - otherwise this is the same usage. A publisher 'gets the scoop' (a great story, a win) or scoops the story just as a mathematician scoops a prize.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

Journalists get a scoop on their rivals when they publish impactful news first.

markhollis• 6 years ago

I wonder how prize winners feel about such huge sums of money. Especially that very succesful people who win such prizes tend to win multiple prizes.

psychometry• 6 years ago

Also, what does a tenured professor of mathematics do with such a sum other than spend it on himself? It's not like he's going to build out a lab and hire a bunch of research staff.

komali2• 6 years ago

He's renting right now so him and his wife are going to buy a house.

IshKebab2• 6 years ago

We don't really have tenure like in America.

foota• 6 years ago

Some don't seem to care, which makes sense to me. It's not like people go into research math for the money. Andrew Wiles gave up their prize for the Fermat's last theorem.

xiaodai2• 6 years ago

Interesting perspective. I guesss you can ask Roger Federer at his prime and other tennis players.

xiaodai2• 6 years ago

Kinda sad that emminent mathematicians can only rent...

mikorym4• 6 years ago

Oh, it's actually called the Breakthrough Prize.

I thought perhaps three of the Millennium problems had been solved, and the apocalypse were here.

BTW, for those interested in P=NP and not so much in the direct mathematical research, one interesting way to approach is via hash functions. If we had P=NP, then hash functions would be more easily invertible (eh, left or right invertible). I think in polynomial time. Sorry for the "I think", this isn't my field and I try to find ways to reinterpret it.

ChrisLomont3• 6 years ago

P,NP, and the invertability of most hash functions are not related, as far as is known. Most one-way functions of use are not known to be NP hard or NP complete, so having P=NP or P != NP would not affect currently widely used hash functions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_function

https://www.quora.com/Is-cryptographic-hash-inversion-believ...

proto-n• 6 years ago

While not NP complete, reverting a hash function is in NP(), so it is very much affected if P=NP.

() Ok obviously it can't be in NP as it's not a decision problem, but asking "is there a preimage starting with 1, with 1A, etc." _is_ in NP. From the it's trivial to generate a preimage in P.

Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

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