A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia.
Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the annual Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual US$3 million 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.
Photo: AFP
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 civilization.
Hairer, who rents a London apartment with his wife, fellow Imperial mathematician Li Xuemei (李雪梅), heard he won the prize in a Skype call while the UK was still in lockdown.
“It was completely unexpected,” he said. “I didn’t think about it at all, so it was a complete shock. We couldn’t go out or anything, so we celebrated at home.”
The award is one of several Breakthrough prizes announced by a foundation set up by the Israeli-Russian investor Yuri Milner and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
A committee of previous recipients chooses the winners who are all leading lights in mathematics and the sciences.
Other winners announced on Thursday include a Hong Kong scientist, Dennis Lo (盧煜明), who was inspired by a 3D Harry Potter movie to develop a test for genetic mutations in DNA shed by fetuses, and a team of physicists whose experiments revealed that if extra dimensions of reality exist, they are curled up smaller than a third of a hair’s width.
Yet another winner, Catherine Dulac at Harvard University, has overturned misconceptions around parenthood by showing that the neural circuits for maternal and paternal behavior are found in both males and females.
Hairer grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, where he soon established himself as a rare talent.
His entry for a school science competition became Amadeus — “the Swiss army knife of sound editing” — now used in updated form by music producers and games designers. He still maintains the software as a sideline to his academic work.
After dallying with physics at university, Hairer moved into mathematics. The realization that ideas in theoretical physics can be overturned and swiftly consigned to the dustbin did not appeal.
“I wouldn’t really want to put my name to a result that could be superseded by something else three years later,” he said. “In mathematics, if you obtain a result then that is it. It’s the universality of mathematics, you discover absolute truths.”
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.
“Like everyone else, I was amazed to see a theory like this, worked out in detail from scratch, with few precedents,” said Jeremy Quastel, a mathematician at the University of Toronto who first mused on the extraterrestrial provenance of the theory.
While his peers roundly consider Hairer a genius, he says 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,” he said.
Hairer’s windfall has yet to land in his bank account, but when it does, his life will change.
“We moved to London somewhat recently, three years ago, and we are still renting. So it might be time to buy a place to live,” he said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
A prominent Christian leader has allegedly been stabbed at the altar during a Mass yesterday in southwest Sydney. Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was saying Mass at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley just after 7pm when a man approached him at the altar and allegedly stabbed toward his head multiple times. A live stream of the Mass shows the congregation swarm forward toward Emmanuel before it was cut off. The church leader gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, amassing a large online following, Officers attached to Fairfield City police area command attended a location on Welcome Street, Wakeley following reports a number