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2019 Breakthrough Prize Honors Pulsar Discovery, 'Multi-Messenger Astronomy' and More

posted by chromas on Monday October 22 2018, @09:59PM   

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell nabbed a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, as we learned last month. Bell Burnell won for her 1967 discovery of the fast-spinning neutron stars known as pulsars, and for her five decades of scientific leadership after that epic find.

The rest of the 2019 winners were announced today (Oct. 17), and they include a pioneer in the field of multi-messenger astronomy, gravitational-wave researchers and scientists investigating the nature of gravity and the quantum realm.

Multi-messenger astronomy refers to the use of different types of information to probe the same cosmic object or phenomenon. The field was born last year, when researchers observed the aftermath of an epic neutron-star collision via both electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time first predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago.

[...] The 2019 Breakthrough Prize features seven $3 million awards — four in life sciences, two in fundamental physics (including the "Special Breakthrough" won by Bell Burnell) and one in mathematics. The six $100,000 "New Horizons" prizes and a $400,000 "Breakthrough Junior Prize" bring the total purse to $22 million. The winners will be honored Nov. 4 during a ceremony at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, that will be hosted by actor Pierce Brosnan.

Source: https://www.space.com/42168-breakthrough-prize-pulsars-multimessenger-astronomy.html

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Original Submission

• Re:Mathematics? Re:Mathematics? (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 23 2018, @06:00AM (1 child)

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday October 23 2018, @06:00AM (#752363) Journal

  https://breakthroughprize.org/News/47 [breakthroughprize.org]

  2019 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics Awarded to Vincent Lafforgue.

  Six “New Horizons” Prizes Worth $600,000 Awarded for Early-Career Achievement in Physics and Math.

  [...] And in Mathematics, for elegant and groundbreaking contributions to the Langlands program in the function field case.

  [...] Breakthrough Prize In Mathematics
  Vincent Lafforgue – CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, France) and Institut Fourier, Université Grenoble Alpes

  Citation: For ground breaking contributions to several areas of mathematics, in particular to the Langlands program in the function field case.

  Description: The French lay claim to some of the greatest mathematical minds ever – from Descartes, Fermat and Pascal to Poincaré. More recently Weil, Serre and Grothendieck have given new foundations to algebraic geometry – from which arithmetic geometry was coined. Vincent Lafforgue is a leader of this latter school – now at the heart of new discoveries into cryptography and information security technologies. He makes his professional home in Grenoble at the CNRS, the largest fundamental science agency in Europe, where he has a tenured position and free rein to ponder the imponderable. Deeply concerned about the ecological crisis, Lafforgue is now focused on operator algebras in quantum mechanics and devising new materials for clean energy technologies. He likes to spend his time hiking in foothills of the Alps.

  “Vincent Lafforgue, in the so called ‘function field case,’ found a beautifully simple direct argument,” said Richard Taylor, the chair of the selection committee. “After seeing it you ask yourself how the rest of us could have missed it for so long. You finally see why Langlands correspondence has to exist – it no longer seems an unmotivated miraculous consequence of complicated computations.”

  [...] New Horizons In Mathematics Prize

  Chenyang Xu – Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research

  Citation: For major advances in the minimal model program and applications to the moduli of algebraic varieties.

  Karim Adiprasito and June Huh – Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Institute for Advanced Study, respectively

  Citation: For the development, with Eric Katz, of combinatorial Hodge theory leading to the resolution of the log-concavity conjecture of Rota.

  Kaisa Matomäki and Maksym Radziwill – University of Turku and California Institute of Technology, respectively

  Citation: For fundamental breakthroughs in the understanding of local correlations of values of multiplicative functions.

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  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

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• Re:Mathematics? (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday October 25 2018, @12:08AM

  by hendrikboom (1125) on Thursday October 25 2018, @12:08AM (#753391) Homepage Journal

  Thanks. I didn't manage to find that. I do recognize some of those words.

  Algebraic geometry? studied it in university. Since then it has become related to category theory (but what isn't these days)

  Arithmetic geometry? No real idea. But there are cryptosystems based intuitively on geometric comstructions involving tangents of secants on elliptic curves. Except that instead of looking at curves in ordinary Euclidean geometry, they use a geometry based on finite fields, thereby dragging the whole subject away from its intuitive meanings. The words are still around, but not the substance.

  Hodge theory? The word Hodge is vaguely familiar. Isn't there something like a Hodge theater discussed in InterUniversal Teichmuller Theory? Whatever that is.

  -- hendrik

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