Thursday, August 24, 2006

Who Wants to Watch?

Is it me or does the Fields medal seem to be getting more attention this year than usual? Nothing like a famous theorem and a crazy mathematician to spice up the awards a bit.

You can watch the ICM invited and prize winning talks here, both live and archived. Speakers of note include Terence Tao, Avi Wigderson (the first two talks of the third session) and, of course, Jon Kleinberg (last talk of the fifth session). Avi has a paper to go with his talk.

On a lighter note watch Stephen Colbert's take on the Fields Medal by clicking here then here.

(Thanks to Lenore Blum and Bill Gasarch for the pointers above.)

In other science news, Pluto is no longer a planet. Everything I learned in grade school was a lie.

16 comments:

  1. I am unable to get to the archived
    videos. Has anyone had luck with
    this? Thanks.

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  2. Is it too much to expect that some of the creationists can be persuaded to focus their energies instead on the Pluto-is-a-planet cause?

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  3. Maybe the attention is "manifold" (hah! Topology ;-)) this year. I received 11 emails pointing to the same 'New Yorker' article.

    Crazy Mathematician?! Quite an opinion! He is what he wants to be. That does not make him "crazy".

    Now when we are upto it, let me ask: Is it because he would get it next time, four years later, or later, because of the age factor, Prof. Manjul Bhargava doesn't get it this year?

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  4. Updated Planet memory device:
    My Very Educated Mother Just Said Uh,
    NO Pluto.

    (Credit: The Colbert Report)

    YES, Fields medal is getting more attention
    than it used to. So did World Cup Soccer.
    I think its because there is so many more
    ways to GET news, so more is being reported.
    To save time and watch only whats really
    important in news, I just watch
    THE DAILY SHOW and THE COLBERT REPORT.

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  5. ALas!! Pluto stripped of planet status. I feel so awful. But on second thoughts, new kids will have to remember only eight planets, unless the "crazy" astronomers introduce one or two more planets.

    Is it because he would get it next time, four years later, or later, because of the age factor, Prof. Manjul Bhargava doesn't get it this year?

    He will get the Fields medal one day. Terrence Tao recieved at teh age of 31 and so could have Bhargava. NOwt many people get Professorship at Princeton directly after their Ph.D.

    At last, after reading the New York article, my respect in Dr. Perelman has been restored. He is not crazy and he deserves Fields Medal. Anyways, the legendary Yau sounded like a total villain in the article. Pity on him.

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  6. Anyways, the legendary Yau sounded like a total villain in the article. Pity on him.

    You mean Shame on him I suppose? The paper was submitted to the Asian Journal of Mathematics in December. Even if we ignore what the New Yorker has to say about the paper being "reviewed" in under three days, it still gives just four months to review a behemoth paper.

    Grigori Perelman's Wikipedia page suggests that Yau's conduct may have been responsible for Perelman becoming disillusioned with mathematics.

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  7. To the 7th anonymous:

    As I heard, Yau and his colleagues at Harvard had spent a lot of time on that AJM paper before its submission.

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  8. Once again, did any one have
    luck trying to find the archived
    talks at the ICM page? Help!!!

    thanks

    ReplyDelete
  9. I did get it to work but it isn't easy. Turn off pop-up blockers. When you get to the main screen, click on "show more" then the icon that looks like a folder with an arrow pointing up then the funny looking icon next to "Third Session".

    I am using Windows XP and IE, I haven't tried it on other platforms.

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  10. To the 8th anonymous:

    As I heard, Yau and his colleagues at Harvard had spent a lot of time on that AJM paper before its submission.

    That still does not account for Yau's merely mentioning Perelman in passing, in his talk in the Friendship hotel in Beijing. The New Yorker article also noted that Yau was trying to malign his former student Tian.

    All this is not becoming of someone who has a Fields medal, and is supposed to be a role model for others. The New Yorker article gives me the impression that Yau is a thug.

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  11. To the 11th anonymous:

    You may take the New Yorker article with a grain of salt. I am sure that Yau is not a saint, he may has his own interests on this matter, but he is not a thug as portrayed by the New Yorker.

    Many Chinese know that Yau has been at a war with his former student Tiang for quite a while. There is a joke around the Chinese community that Tiang is the third author of the New Yorker article.

    Interestingly, it was also a New Yorker article that somehow heated up the conflict of Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, two Chinese Nobel winners in Physics in 1957.

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  12. How can China produce competent topologists when tea cups and youtiao are not topologically equivalent?

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  13. To the 12th anonymous:

    Are you Shing-Tung Yau by any chance?

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  14. There's a well-written simple commentary on Perelman's rejection of the Fields medal in the NYT Week in Review.

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  15. What's the success rate for reclusive mathematicians who lock themselves up in a far away place (e.g. an attic ala Wiles) to work on an outstanding problem? And if they don't succeed, do they become the unibomber?

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  16. Thanks for the Colbert links...Am quoting those links on my blog .

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