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/sci/ - Science & Math

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1624563 No.1624563 [Reply] [Original]

So wikipedia says that the Fields medal was awarded today. Any math guy around to explain what those people were given prizes for to the somewhat-but-not-completely mathematically proficient people like me out there?

>> No.1624587
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1624587

Does anyone remember who got the Nobel Prize in Mathematics last year?

Problems, Mrs. Nobel?

>> No.1624595
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1624595

Basically some people proved some famous math problems and were given awards for doing so.

>> No.1624606

>>1624595
slow down, I'm having trouble understanding you. Use less specific terms.

>> No.1624713

>>1624595
go on...

>> No.1624785

From a brief read on Elon Lindenstrauss, he proved that some identities for orbital integrals over different algebraic structures can be used. I don't have a good understanding of it, but it sounds as though it's a way to make extending calculus to more abstract domains easier.

>> No.1624813

Honestly, higher mathematics is extremely difficult to describe to even well-educated lay people. There's just so much terminology and a priori knowledge that you have to know to even understand the questions. Then usually you have to be an expert in the field to understand the implications.

>> No.1624819

Oops, that was actually Ngo Bao Chao. Elon Lindenstrauss got his for a study of ergodic theory, which is a study of how you can get invariant things if you measure them differently. He did some stuff with it that helped solve problems in equations with integer solutions.

>> No.1624829

>>1624819

That was actually a pretty damn good explanation.

>> No.1624861

>>1624813
I thnik it's especially because there is no physical intuition for it. Being a mathfag, people sometimes ask me what I study or what I do.
I explain to them: well today in class we studied *math-thing*.
-what's that?
-it's a structure following these axioms
- ...

The abstraction makes it hard to describe unlike basic math where you can clearly point out what a cube is or that if you divide an orange in 3, you immediately see what the result is.


So the mathematics involved at Field's Medal level will take years of study if you really want to understand it.

>> No.1624885

>>1624861

Yeah, that's why I like simple problems that require ridiculous math. Elliptic curves are a good field for that. I can at least explain the problems to people even if I can't explain how I got the results.

>> No.1624898

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what Stanislav Smirnov got his for. It's statistical physics where he proved that percolation was invariant in two important two-dimensional models.