He justifies bombing of children hospital in Odessa (far from the frontline) by the fact that Ukraine sometimes uses evacuated buildings on the frontline as bases.
The commenter stated that the Ukrainian Army often puts troops and military hardware near civilian infrastructure (true). They did not assert that this was the case for the specific Odessa hospital in question (merely that it was a possibility), or that this justifies Russian bombings.
I'm not the person who made the statement. They asked the question. That's exactly the opposite of making an assessment. That person tries to find someone who CAN make that assessment to answer the question.
You wrote: > I agree that it is a distasteful question. But what is much more distasteful that it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for the answer to that question to be yes. So you said it is not out of the realm of possibility for it to be the case, that is an assessment. By your own statement, you are in no position to judge, so how do you know it is possible?
How do I know it's possible? Because it's decided by people. People are sensitive for these kinds of things. What I meant with assessment in this case is that I cannot judge whether this is happened in this specific case. As in I don't know enough about mathematics to make an assessment. Not I don't know enough about committees to say it's possible or not. I thought that would be clear from the post but I can see how you misunderstood it.
It's interesting that the Field's medal award is quite a bit lower than the Nobel Prize's (~$15K vs ~$1mm) and is only awarded every four years, yet it still garners a lot of interest, speculation, and possibly envy from non-winners. Is there some kind of side-benefit to winning beyond the renown (which is probably a double-edged sword)?
Have to be under 40 too, so it isn't really an equivalent to the Nobel. Maths culture is weird though, long held belief that it is a young person's game.
I always found it weird how it was dominated by the french, with very few germans in between (only 2!). What are they doing differently? It's not that math is unpopular here, a lot of students are studying mathematics and every university has a math department. But they are absolutely dominating and I can't really explain it.
I always found it weird how it was dominated by the french, with very few germans in between (only 2!). What are they doing differently? It's not that math is unpopular here, a lot of students are studying mathematics and every university has a math department. But they are absolutely dominating and I can't really explain it.
I can tell you why. In German 25 is five and twenty. 67 is seven and sixty. Annoying but bearable. However, in French, 60 is sixty. 70 is sixty ten. 80 is four twenty. 90 is four twenty ten. 99 is four twenty nineteen. Any French person is steeled by their crazy numbering system, from an early age, allowing them to reach the highest mathematical heights as they grow.
Danish is worse, or at least as bad. Sixty is three twenties, so fifty is half three twenties. Eighty is four twenties, so seventy is half four twenties. Ninety is half five twenties, but a hundred is just a hundred. Sanity, at last! (The twenties have been abbreviated over the years to just an -s ending, so sixty is “tres” and so on. But still …)
Can anyone give a little insight into how some of these discoveries can have engineering applications? There are some abstracts, but has anyone looked at this and seen potential uses in computer science? I'm surprised there aren't more comments on this on Hacker News considering it's the Fields Medal.
> I'm surprised there aren't more comments on this on Hacker News considering it's the Fields Medal. Many would argue that looking for engineering applications in mathematics is not why mathematicians do mathematics. That mathematics does sometimes have engineering applications is a mysterious and beautiful side effect. It isn't the motivation behind doing mathematics.
Indeed, a possibly apocryphal tale holds that matrix algebra, while a beautiful mathematical construct, was considered by its inventor to be utterly useless. We know better today.
It's interesting that the Field's medal award is quite a bit lower than the Nobel Prize's (~$15K vs ~$1mm) and is only awarded every four years, yet it still garners a lot of interest, speculation, and possibly envy from non-winners. Is there some kind of side-benefit to winning beyond the renown (which is probably a double-edged sword)?
Have to be under 40 too, so it isn't really an equivalent to the Nobel. Maths culture is weird though, long held belief that it is a young person's game.
There is the Abel prize, which so far has been awarded only to pretty old people. But it has only been around since 2003, so it does not quite have the weight of history behind it.
Politics plays an important role in those awards, for example this year's awards were due to be presented at the ICM in Saint Petersburg, Russia but the ceremony was moved to Helsinki. But for this particular case, Maryna was on everyone's list and she has done exceptional work.
The choice of venue and the choice of Fields medal recipients are unrelated decisions, taken by different groups of people. Of course the former is much more strongly influenced by world events. And indeed, it took only a few days after the invasion to realize that the planned ICM in Saint Petersburg was impossible.