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Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

imperial.ac.uk

31–40 of 111 posts

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#31

That's not what "scoops" means! A scoop is publishing something before a rival can. You scoop the rival, not the story/prize.

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

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#33

That's not what "scoops" means! A scoop is publishing something before a rival can. You scoop the rival, not the story/prize.

> That's not what "scoops" means!

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

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#34
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Imperial suffers from that too. We'd joke (perhaps in slight pain) about it as freshers - 'so, Oxford or Cambridge?' or 'which college?', etc.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#35

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

> This prize isn’t too highly regarded.

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

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#36
post #12
post #4

There is a 2014 Quanta Magazine article on Martin Hairer which I found interesting. https://www.quantamagazine.org/hearing-music-in-noise-martin...

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.

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.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#37

That's not what "scoops" means! A scoop is publishing something before a rival can. You scoop the rival, not the story/prize.

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.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warwick is particularly well regarded for its mathematics department.

I thought it was well known it was ahead of Oxford for Maths, second only to Cambridge and Imperial

It's my impression that rankings for mathematics generally put Oxford ahead of both Imperial and Warwick and sometimes even ahead of Cambridge.

https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/universi... https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin... https://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/league-tables/r...

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#39
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Don't a number of universities belong to that category? I've certainly heard it about Durham:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxbridge_reject

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#40

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

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?

Yes
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