Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
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Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
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Re: Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
#2Following Shaw Price in 2019 https://invidious.projectsegfau.lt/watch?v=22hR2CkNGXE
Re: Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
#3I've used and read about many concentration inequalities in machine learning and other applied math disciplines (Hoeffdings, McDiarmid, etc).
Talagrands' results seem to generalize those, but I haven't had the chance to see them in the wild (yet).
Re: Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
#4Ironically, the Wikipedia pages about him in French [1] and English [2] are, currently, super short. It will help if Wikipedia (just giving them as an example) could handle the focus on certain people and topics in an smarter way and not after the facts. Wikipedia has a special opportunity about handling this because it is the canonical general reference on Internet.
Hallucinated or not I found a better starting point on [3], a Reddit post of 2 years ago with a comment saying:
"Even professional mathematicians are barely qualified to choose the best mathematician in their narrow field of expertise, let alone in general…
(Before I left math, the most difficult work I encountered was by Michel Talagrand.)" [4] and last, but would be first indeed his own web page [5]. He even gives prizes ala Knuth for solving specific math problems.
Last, really few mentions in *stackexchange.com and Reddit.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Talagrand
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Talagrand
[3] https://chat.openai.com/share/39374448-da85-4897-977a-aaa37e...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/s81ysm/who_would_you_...
[5] https://michel.talagrand.net/
[6] https://www.google.com/search?q=Michel+Talagrand+site%3Astac... and https://www.google.com/search?q=Michel+Talagrand+site%3Aredd...
Re: Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
#5Ironically, the Wikipedia pages about him in French [1] and English [2] are, currently, super short. It will help if Wikipedia (just giving them as an example) could handle the focus on certain people and topics in an smarter way and not after the facts. Wikipedia has a special opportunity about handling this because it is the canonical general reference on Internet. Hallucinated or not I found a better starting poin…
That was me on Reddit. I emailed him asking about some of his work on invariant means in the 1970s. He said “I had no taste then”, and told me what a waste of time it was.
At that point, I decided to go into data science instead of trying to get a post doc…
Re: Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
#6Ironically, the Wikipedia pages about him in French [1] and English [2] are, currently, super short. It will help if Wikipedia (just giving them as an example) could handle the focus on certain people and topics in an smarter way and not after the facts. Wikipedia has a special opportunity about handling this because it is the canonical general reference on Internet. Hallucinated or not I found a better starting poin…
That was me on Reddit. I emailed him asking about some of his work on invariant means in the 1970s. He said “I had no taste then”, and told me what a waste of time it was. At that point, I decided to go into data science instead of trying to get a post doc…
How do you feel about that decision now? I left math after my PhD and often find myself feeling nostalgic about it.
Re: Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
#7Ironically, the Wikipedia pages about him in French [1] and English [2] are, currently, super short. It will help if Wikipedia (just giving them as an example) could handle the focus on certain people and topics in an smarter way and not after the facts. Wikipedia has a special opportunity about handling this because it is the canonical general reference on Internet. Hallucinated or not I found a better starting poin…
> [...] and not after the facts
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, they intentionally only cover topics retroactively, and preferably after the dust has settled. They're intentionally not intending to be many things, including a source of up to date news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
Re: Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
#8I know Talagrand because some of his work comes up in topological dynamics (work around Rosenthal's l¹-dichotomy culminating in the Bourgain-Fremlin-Talagrand dicothomy for compact sets of Baire class 1 functions), but I had no idea he has such accomplishments in other fields! Impressive
Re: Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
#9Ironically, the Wikipedia pages about him in French [1] and English [2] are, currently, super short. It will help if Wikipedia (just giving them as an example) could handle the focus on certain people and topics in an smarter way and not after the facts. Wikipedia has a special opportunity about handling this because it is the canonical general reference on Internet. Hallucinated or not I found a better starting poin…
> [...] and not after the facts Wikipedia is an encyclopedia , they intentionally only cover topics retroactively, and preferably after the dust has settled. They're intentionally not intending to be many things, including a source of up to date news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
No pun intended. We all see (right?) that one of the cultural topics of the XXI is about focus. In a relative past people could study and/or read "all" texts and be intellectuals or feel like that. It is obvious that the focus economy always existed but now there are zillions of potential content to consume (good or not, doesn't matter).
Wikipedia, as an example, has the opportunity to add layers (not many) of content in the quest of helping (not solving) this focus problem. As you said Wikipedia does not currently has this purpose, but this does not mean that they cannot carry the lit torch and pay attention to the focus economy (wordplay just by chance).
It is also important to highlight that Wikipedia has many externalities, it is not just them. For example, Wikipedia results are generally the first that cames up in a search engine and their content is much used in machine learning. In this context, the problem of focus is not just about Wikipedia itself but the "focus graph" that has Wikipedia as one of the top releveant nodes.
Re: Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was me on Reddit. I emailed him asking about some of his work on invariant means in the 1970s. He said “I had no taste then”, and told me what a waste of time it was. At that point, I decided to go into data science instead of trying to get a post doc…
How do you feel about that decision now? I left math after my PhD and often find myself feeling nostalgic about it.
Always something to look forward to in [early] retirement to keep the mind active.