Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

imperial.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 111 posts

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#41

Post by chrisseaton »

learnstats2 wrote: post #15
agent008t wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> I imagine that a knighted professor at Imperial can comfortably access a mortgage in London

You don't get paid for being knighted. And these universities have a mostly fixed pay scale it's not like Google where you can just demand whatever you want if you're good enough.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#42

Post by [deleted] »

asib wrote: post #13
agent008t wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#43

Post by bosie »

asib wrote: post #13
agent008t wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Costs you a mighty penny too, though. Commute Reading to Kings Cross should be close to 5k a year (not including tube), no?

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#44

Post by yaseer »

leoc wrote: post #36
dash2 wrote: 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.

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.

'...unheard of to most people internationally.'

Taking this point further, I note there's a huge Anglo-Saxon bias in the prestige of Universities.

I don't know why this is.

I say this having studied at Oxford and Cambridge and noticed how 'unfair' it was that many French and German universities had undergraduate bodies with even higher selection standards, yet few people internationally would have heard of them.

It seems odd to me that Harvard and Oxbridge are well known, but an elite German university like TUM is not.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#45

Post by Google234 »

protomolecule wrote: post #25
Google234 wrote: post #6

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." [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:…

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

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#46

Post by Google234 »

protomolecule wrote: post #27
mellosouls wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They are all related to a single award -- 2019 (special) for supergravity.

They’ve been giving awards to failed ideas since the start.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#47

Post by p-a_58213 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #41
learnstats2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I imagine that a knighted professor at Imperial can comfortably access a mortgage in London You don't get paid for being knighted. And these universities have a mostly fixed pay scale it's not like Google where you can just demand whatever you want if you're good enough.

Well, there does exist a fixed pay scale for base salaries, but for senior academic grades in many occasions this simply defines the minimum salary, and the rest is negotiable (particularly if the academic has a good record of obtaining research grants).

Then again, there exist Business Schools, where due to the different funding model (most income comes from MBAs, as opposed to research grant overheads, and undergraduate tuition fees), full professors can easily make near-£200k in base salary.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#48

Post by 19f191ty »

wmwmwm wrote: post #5
ForHackernews wrote: post #3

> 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.

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...

I think he us the original creator of Amadeus

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#49

Post by throwaway2245 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #41
learnstats2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I imagine that a knighted professor at Imperial can comfortably access a mortgage in London You don't get paid for being knighted. And these universities have a mostly fixed pay scale it's not like Google where you can just demand whatever you want if you're good enough.

Senior professors negotiate their pay.
Post reply on HN