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posted by martyb on Friday September 11 2020, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the my-brain-hurts! dept.

UK mathematician wins richest prize in academia:

Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (£2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.

Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem.

His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to “regularity structures”, so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.

[...] Hairer’s expertise lies in stochastic partial differential equations, a branch of mathematics that describes how randomness throws disorder into processes such as the movement of wind in a wind tunnel or the creeping boundary of a water droplet landing on a tissue. When the randomness is strong enough, solutions to the equations get out of control. “In some cases, the solutions fluctuate so wildly that it is not even clear what the equation meant in the first place,” he said.

With the invention of regularity structures, Hairer showed how the infinitely jagged noise that threw his equations into chaos could be reframed and tamed. When he published the theory in 2014, it made an immediate splash.

[...] While his peers roundly consider Hairer a genius, he admits mathematics can be infuriating. “Most of the time it doesn’t work out. As pretty much every single graduate student in mathematics can attest, during your PhD you probably spend two-thirds of your time getting stuck and banging your head against a wall.”

Differential equations come in different forms; among them: Ordinary, Partial, and Non-linear. Martin worked on solving to stochastic differential equations.

Journal Reference:
Hairer, Martin. A theory of regularity structures, (DOI: 10.1007/s00222-014-0505-4)


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Friday September 11 2020, @10:33PM (6 children)

    by looorg (578) on Friday September 11 2020, @10:33PM (#1049698)

    ... that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.

    Since there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics it shouldn't be very hard for this to rival that. Have they confused this with the Fields medal again?

    • (Score: 2) by Kell on Friday September 11 2020, @11:45PM

      by Kell (292) on Friday September 11 2020, @11:45PM (#1049736)

      Arguably, the MacArthur Fellowship would be a competitor, but being a fellowship rather than a prize per se... I dunno.

      --
      Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
    • (Score: 4, Touché) by FatPhil on Saturday September 12 2020, @12:04AM (2 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday September 12 2020, @12:04AM (#1049739) Homepage
      There doesn't need to be one in order for their point to be an arguable similie.

      The world's tallest man was nearly as tall as a horse. Horses don't need to ever be men for that "X is as [property] as Y" to make perfect sense.

      If anything, it makes more sense to use a similie because there was no X in Y. The tallest man is as tall as a man! What are you on? The Nobel prize for literature is as presigious as a Nobel prize! You're just babbling now.

      The correct argument you should have made is "but it's no Fields Medal, despite the increased wodge associated with it", or simply "monetary value has never been a measure of intrinsic worth".
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @02:20AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @02:20AM (#1049782)
        +10 pedantic
        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday September 13 2020, @08:48AM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday September 13 2020, @08:48AM (#1050289) Homepage
          Some people like dropping truth bombs, I'm more a truth napalm kinda guy.
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday September 12 2020, @03:06AM

      by driverless (4770) on Saturday September 12 2020, @03:06AM (#1049798)

      a 180-page [math] treatise [...] so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation

      Man, these guys really need to get out more...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @04:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @04:46PM (#1049996)

      Most likely. A couple of prizes have been set up by rich people where they want to equate $$ with prestige [newyorker.com], so they make sure that the level of funding rivals or betters what the Nobel gives (or Noble, depending on what color hat you wear).

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @11:28PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @11:28PM (#1049730)

    Another fekkin white dude. They dominate STEM, and they need to be dealt with. He could change his name to Mary, and identify as a tranny. He could just come out as gay. He could identify as a furry. WTF does he identify as a white guy? He's probably Christian, on top of all that. He could even have kept quiet about his identity, and allowed his mother/wife/sister/daughter to claim the prize. But, no, he has inflicted his toxic masculinity on the world. All those STEM mofos do that!! WE NEED DIVERSITY!!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @02:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @02:23AM (#1049785)

      He may be a genius but can he do "New Math"?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday September 12 2020, @02:43AM (1 child)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday September 12 2020, @02:43AM (#1049790) Homepage

    Cheers to one more step of human progress and a great SN post.

    I've been watching some educational videos lately and it's awesome how much knowledge we've amassed as a species as well as how much we still don't know. I look forward to a simplified explanation of this in the next few years so I can actually understand it.

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday September 13 2020, @06:58PM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 13 2020, @06:58PM (#1050433) Homepage Journal

      Here's what I got from a very limited reading of part of the paper.

      A lot of real-world stuff has random influences, but we still want to calculate what happens with differential equations.

      So we insert a random noise term into the equation.

      This much is easy.

      But then we want to solve the equation.

      This is not easy, because random noise tends to be very jaggy, and things that are very jaggy usually don't have derivatives ... so what does the differential equation even mean.

      So what he does is stick a quadratic approximation at every point on the solution. Apparently there are a lot of these problems on which this is feasible. Well, (maybe?) a quadratic bound on local jagginess.

      And these quadratic bounds are enough to put bounds on the derivatives.

      And then (somehow -- here's the part I didn't follow) he puts al those infinitely many quadratics together to make the whole process work so you can get on with the job, making the job somewhat meaningful and maybe even feasible.

      Lots of probability distribution wobbling around between those quadratic bounds.

      -- hendrik

      -- hendrik

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