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Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

imperial.ac.uk

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Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#91

Post by maukg »

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 have a lot to learn about the London housing market and UK salaries.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#93

Post by skei »

dan-robertson wrote: post #26
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.

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…

I did my undergrad, Masters, and PhD at Warwick. I was originally aiming for a Cambridge, for a conditional offer, and failed to make the grades in the exams.

No regrets. Warwick is a fantastic university.

I actually met Martin Hairer a few times, as my doctorate was between maths, physics, and computer science departments. We didn't overlap much in interests ( or ability... ) but he seemed nice.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#95

Post by OJFord »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #83
OJFord wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I've never heard that usage before either. ('on their'.) Whenever I've used or heard it, the scoop is the prize-analagous story.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#96

Post by kkylin »

melling wrote: post #30
_Microft wrote: 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...

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.

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.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#97

Post by mindcrime »

mellosouls wrote: post #87
mindcrime wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This prize isn’t too highly regarded. > there has been criticism of the physics prize in the past Those... aren't the same thing. I'm sure you could dredge up a few criticisms of the Nobel Prize in Physics as well, but would anybody say that the prize isn't highly regarded in general? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Phys...

Please don't quote me selectively if it distorts the point. It was harsh, and perhaps a little out of date

I don't see any distortion of the point. All I'm saying is that the fact that something has been criticized in the past does not (necessarily) equate to justification for a position of "it's not highly regarded".

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#98

Post by asib »

room271 wrote: post #56
asib wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ha I agree with the broad point, but as someone who (used to until Covid) commute from South London to Kings Cross everyday, this doesn't seem true timewise until you live quite far South in London. And I live a 15 minute walk from a tube station. Having said that, I agree with the sentiment!

Tooting -> Kings X is 49 minutes according to citymapper. Cambridge -> Kings X is a 48 minute train. I personally wouldn't consider Tooting to be deep south, but maybe we have different definitions. I have a friend who lives near Kingston, it's roughly an hour commute for him.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#99

Post by LostTrackHowM »

yaseer wrote: post #44
leoc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Like it or not English is the global lingua franca. The top global talent is unlikely interested in being educated or researching in other languages.

And national university in my opinion should educate in their nation's language(s). Even if it means losing the very crème de la crème of global talent.

If the EU could get its shit together they might some day dump more money in universities than even America does. And create some giant English based universities located on the coast of a sea, somewhere where the EU has the best climate. All just to compete with the global top universities.

Re: Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize

#100

Post by ChrisLomont »

mikorym wrote: post #90

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. So…

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...

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