2007 Abel Prize
April 13th, 2007 by WaltThe 2007 Abel Prize has been announced. The winner is S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan for his work on large deviations in probability. Large deviations are asymptotic estimates of rare events. They are of practical importance, for example, in justifying the results of statistical mechanics. Cosma Shalizi’s notebook on large deviations provides an overview and many more links.
I find it interesting that the Abel Prize has taken a turn towards the applied in recent years. The first two awards, to Serre and to Atiyah and Singer, track the expectations of pure mathematicians. In the last three years, though, one prize has gone to Peter Lax, who works in applied PDEs, and now this year Varadhan. (The other winner is Lennart Carleson.)
April 13th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
The link on the words “statistical mechanics” just points back to this page. Empty A HREF tag?
April 13th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Thanks! Fixed. (I put two open quotes in the A HREF, which it treated as an empty tag.)
April 13th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
That link looks empty to the browser because of an extra quote after the href=. It tried to point to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics
As for the applied math bit, I distinctly remember Peter Lax saying in his acceptance speech that he considers pure mathematics a branch of applied mathematics. He was joking of course, but I think he was serious too: The distinction between pure and applied is getting increasingly blurred, or so it seems to me anyway.
April 21st, 2007 at 11:40 am
“Peter Lax saying in his acceptance speech that he considers pure mathematics a branch of applied mathematics.”
That’s obviously a joke, because, if taken literally, it is as silly as saying:
“Science Fiction is a branch of Mundane Literature” when everyone since John Campbell knows that, in fact, Mundane Literature is a subset of Science Fiction (restricted to a very narrow domain of space and time).