
How Math Got Its ‘Nobel’ - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/how-math-got-its-nobel-.html
======
atmosx
I always had mixed feelings about Alfred Nobel. A person who spent his life
producing guns, then created the Nobel prizes, who often go to people that
absolutely do not deserve it for _political reasons_ ridiculing the prizes
(e.g. Nobel for peace to Obama, G. W. Bush run for it and came 2nd!), but
economics Nobels is also highly disputable.

As for Math the article states:

> Nobel omitted mathematics simply because it was not as important to him as
> other endeavors were.

Any person who has looked at any science at even small depth needs mathematics
to _express_ concepts. Mathematics are the _lingua franca_ of the universe.
You can't do Physics, Chemistry, Biology or even social sciences like
Economics without a basic understanding of mathematics.

So IMHO Nobel (as I said I have mixed feelings for him), new that mathematics
_goes without saying_ and didn't create a Nobel for Mathematics. The fields
medals is an excellent prize though, so IMHO there's no real gap.

~~~
afafsd
> A person who spent his life producing guns

Explosives.

>G. W. Bush run for it and came 2nd!

You don't "run for it", and the information about who "came second" is never
released, so I don't know where you heard this, but it's not true.

Not that I disagree with your point about the Peace and to a lesser extent
Literature prizes being horrendously politicised.

If I were the Nobel committee then each year I'd give the Nobel Peace Prize to
a random civilian somewhere in the world who minds his own damn business.

~~~
atmosx
True explosives (dynamite and all) was his thing... But on the moral side of
things it's the same.

For GW Bush I am reproducing what I ve read, but might very well be FUD,
thanks for pointing that out. :-)

~~~
afafsd
>True explosives (dynamite and all) was his thing... But on the moral side of
things it's the same.

Without getting into the morality of gun technology (since the morality of a
gun rather depends on whose hands you put it into), I'd say it's rather
different because guns are used primarily as weapons whereas most of the
world's explosives are used for peaceful purposes, in mining. Dyno Nobel is,
to this day, one of the world's biggest suppliers of mining explosives.

------
Jun8
Here's a good article from *Mathematical Intelligencer" on the topic (sorry, a
bad scan):
[http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~ljc/mittag2.pdf](http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~ljc/mittag2.pdf).

------
Dewie
According to Wikipedia, the Abel Prize is considered by some as _the Nobel
Prize of mathematics_.

~~~
magicalist
It's an analogy to explain to people the prestige and honor that comes along
with the prize. There's no official ruling to be found on which one is
considered to be more like the Nobel prize, and it really doesn't matter.

The Fields Medal certainly has history and pedigree behind it (the Abel Prize
was first awarded in 2003), but it also has some oddities, like the fact that
it has an age limit, which means you won't get prizes for many mathematicians'
seminal results, which often come after decades of work.

~~~
Dewie
> It's an analogy to explain to people the prestige and honor that comes along
> with the prize. There's no official ruling to be found on which one is
> considered to be more like the Nobel prize,

Um, you really don't think that I know that? "like the Nobel Prize" clearly
means that it is the most, or one of the most, prestigious prices in its
field.

I continue to use the term in the colloquial sense that the article uses.
What's so hard to understand about that?

EDIT: that's a decent amount of downvotes for a thread with relatively few
comments. I'm impressed, people!

~~~
magicalist
> _What 's so hard to understand about that?_

Understand what, exactly? Your original post didn't make it at all clear what
you were posting about, so I assumed you were attempting to contest the
honorific, though, again, for no clear reason. Apologies if I assumed
incorrectly, but there wasn't a whole lot of context to go on.

~~~
Dewie
It's a fairly neutral statement - some mathematicians (I'm not even stating
_my_ opinion) _apparently_ think that some other prize might have the status
of "the Nobel Prize". I mean, that's the whole fucking point of the post - to
make a note of the fact that this other prize might not be the most
prestigious prize _in some people 's eyes_, that some other prize might have
the same level of prestige. Not to diminish to the Fields Medal, but to add a
somewhat relevant factoid to the thread, considering that the article was so
focused on the Nobel prize-like status of the Fields Medal. But of course
since this is a somewhat typical Web forum, people have to assume the worst
intent and try to snipe it, forcing me to belabor the original point which
only needed one sentence to express.

------
kps

      > Many mathematicians will tell you that Nobel omitted mathematics from his 
      > prizes to spite the Swedish mathematician Gosta Mittag-Leffler, a rival
    

The one I heard, as a math undergrad, was that a mathematician took Nobel's
wife to the limit in the horizontal plane.

~~~
Jun8
This juicy gossip fails to die, please see, e.g.
[http://www.snopes.com/science/nobel.asp](http://www.snopes.com/science/nobel.asp)
for a nice debunking. For one thing Nobel never had a wife. Also, he emigrated
from Sweden in 1865 when Mittag-Leffler was a student and rarely returned to
visit.

