
2010 Fields Medal Awarded - rw
http://www.icm2010.in/imu-prizes/prize-winners-2010
======
nickpinkston
Did anyone read what these people did? It's amazing this is still English!
Check out one:

Elon Lindenstrauss is being awarded the 2010 Fields Medal for his results on
measure rigidity in ergodic theory, and their applications to number theory.

Fields Medal - Elon Lindenstrauss, Princeton University Lindenstrauss has made
far-reaching advances in ergodic theory, the study of measure preserving
transformations. His work on a conjecture of Furstenberg and Margulis
concerning the measure rigidity of higher rank diagonal actions in homogeneous
spaces has led to striking applications. Specifically, jointly with Einsiedler
and Katok, he established the conjecture under a further hypothesis of
positive entropy. It has impressive applications to the classical Littlewood
Conjecture in the theory of diophantine approximation. Developing these as
well other powerful ergodic theoretic and arithmetical ideas, Lindenstrauss
resolved the arithmetic quantum unique ergodicity conjecture of Rudnick and
Sarnak in the theory of modular forms. He and his collaborators have found
many other unexpected applications of these ergodic theoretic techniques in
problems in classical number theory. His work is exceptionally deep and its
impact goes far beyond ergodic theory.

~~~
jballanc
Ergodic theory is a theory that comes from Statistical Mechanics. Imagine you
have a handful of atoms and a box, now let's say that you line the atoms up
along one side of the box and give them all a push perfectly perpendicular to
the side (oh, and the sides are perfectly flat). What happens? The atoms keep
just bouncing back and forth between those two sides, and large regions of the
box never have any atoms in them. If this situation could happen in real life,
then Statistical Mechanics would have serious problems! So Ergodic Theory is
basically the study of making sure that the atoms in a box bounce all over
equally...

~~~
cma
Covered a bit in Cybernetics:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=NnM-
uISyywAC&lpg=PP1...](http://books.google.com/books?id=NnM-
uISyywAC&lpg=PP1&dq=cybernetics&pg=PA49#v=onepage&q=ergodic&f=false)

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ethanhuynh
I'm from Vietnam, and Ngo Bao Chau made us proud

~~~
Evgeny
Honest question to the HN audience:

Do you think that being proud of someone just because he's your compatriot is
rational or irrational?

After all, you just share the same nationality by random chance, therefore
isn't it the same as being proud that you were born on the same day of the
week as Einstein or that your hair is the same colour as George Washington's?

~~~
kenjackson
It's unclear if its rational to be "proud",but I do think it might be rational
to be happy about it.

To the extent that people make snap judgments about other people based on race
or nationality, it would seem that you'd want people that share your ethnicity
or nationality to do well. This likely has a minor increase in people's
perception of you.

Likewise, you probably feel shame or unhappiness when the opposite happens.
Just look at what being Muslim is like in the US now.

~~~
ovi256
You inspired a related question: is it irrational that I feel proud of the two
French people although I'm not French, I just live in France ? Plus, the
Vietnamese mathematician has studied and worked in France.

I somehow feel proud that I made a good choice of place to live for now, if
that makes any sense.

PS: I noticed they are almost all "outsiders", foreigners that immigrated to
Western countries, or locals outside the traditional elite of the Western
countries. The point, which is a depressing one, is that mathematics and, more
generally, pure science, is an "outsider" activity nowadays.

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kvs
Read Harry Kesten's laudation of Stas Smirnov, you can skip over the "details"
and it's still a fun read: [http://www.icm2010.in/wp-
content/icmfiles/laudaions/fields3....](http://www.icm2010.in/wp-
content/icmfiles/laudaions/fields3.pdf)

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mian2zi3
Tao has a nice post describing some of the accomplishments of the Fields medal
winners here:

[http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/lindenstrauss-
ngo-s...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/lindenstrauss-ngo-smirnov-
villani/)

