
Imperial mathematician scoops $3M Breakthrough Prize - guerby
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/203853/imperial-mathematician-scoops-3m-breakthrough-prize/
======
_Microft
There is a 2014 Quanta Magazine article on Martin Hairer which I found
interesting.

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/hearing-music-in-noise-
martin...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/hearing-music-in-noise-martin-
hairer-wins-the-fields-medal-20140812/)

~~~
dash2
One thing I learned: he did his work while at Warwick. Warwick is kind of
under-estimated among UK universities. It's reasonably well-run (which makes
it almost unique), regularly hires smart people, and doesn't have the
Brideshead Revisited hangover of Oxbridge.

~~~
dan-robertson
Basically since Warwick was founded, it had a reputation for being the place
people went to when they were rejected from oxbridge. This sounds bad but one
subtlety with the U.K. system is that almost all students may apply to at most
one of Oxford and Cambridge in any given year and those universities tend to
get more sufficiently good applicants than they take in. If one of Oxford or
Cambridge is commonly considered better than the other by applicants then
Warwick the distribution of the abilities of the rejects is higher than if
they had all applied to a single top university equal in size to the sum of
Oxford and Cambridge. Therefore Warwick gets to take in lots of very good
undergraduates.

The university was founded in the 60s out of what used to be a research
retreat for mathematicians. At its inception a large portion of its
mathematics department (at least the topologies) came directly from Cambridge
(I believe the story is that Christopher Zeeman went around his colleagues
telling them that all the others were going to Warwick). And in the
mathematics department in particular has been strong ever since.

I believe the course structure is also different there than from oxbridge (or
many other U.K. universities) in that it is meant to be more like an American
university with more choice to pursue courses from different subjects or with
wide varieties of specialisation.

~~~
arethuza
Don't a number of universities belong to that category? I've certainly heard
it about Durham:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxbridge_reject](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxbridge_reject)

~~~
IshKebab
Yeah it's definitely Durham. I've never heard it said about Warwick.

------
ForHackernews
> He won the Fields Medal in 2014

Damn. I'm sure he appreciates the $3M (elsewhere he joked that he could
finally afford to buy a house in London) but the Fields Medal is a much bigger
deal in the world of mathematics.

~~~
agent008t
Which actually made me wonder - where/how do London academics live? I find it
hard to imagine them commuting for hours from the suburbs - it does not seem
very consistent with an academic life - but I do not see them being able to
afford to live near their universities either.

~~~
asib
> I find it hard to imagine them commuting for hours from the suburbs...

Why? It's as easy to commute from certain places outside of London as inside.
For instance, it takes longer for me to get from where I live in south London
to e.g. Kings Cross than it would to get there from Cambridge. The amount of
time you save by living more centrally is probably less than 20 minutes.

~~~
room271
Ha I agree with the broad point, but as someone who (used to until Covid)
commute from South London to Kings Cross everyday, this doesn't seem true
timewise until you live quite far South in London. And I live a 15 minute walk
from a tube station.

Having said that, I agree with the sentiment!

~~~
asib
Tooting -> Kings X is 49 minutes according to citymapper. Cambridge -> Kings X
is a 48 minute train. I personally wouldn't consider Tooting to be deep south,
but maybe we have different definitions. I have a friend who lives near
Kingston, it's roughly an hour commute for him.

~~~
room271
I don't know how City Mapper is getting that number to be honest. TFL gives 35
minutes, and that includes 5 minutes for walking out the tube at Kings Cross.

The trick is you have to change at Stockwell onto the Victoria Line.

Nb. I did almost this journey every day pre-lockdown and the numbers are
accurate for me at least.

------
mikorym
Oh, it's actually called the _Breakthrough Prize_.

I thought perhaps three of the Millennium problems had been solved, and the
apocalypse were here.

BTW, for those interested in P=NP and not so much in the direct mathematical
research, one interesting way to approach is via hash functions. If we had
P=NP, then hash functions would be more easily invertible (eh, left or right
invertible). I think in polynomial time. Sorry for the "I think", this isn't
my field and I try to find ways to reinterpret it.

~~~
ChrisLomont
P,NP, and the invertability of most hash functions are not related, as far as
is known. Most one-way functions of use are not known to be NP hard or NP
complete, so having P=NP or P != NP would not affect currently widely used
hash functions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-
way_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_function)

[https://www.quora.com/Is-cryptographic-hash-inversion-
believ...](https://www.quora.com/Is-cryptographic-hash-inversion-believed-to-
be-NP-complete-or-NP-hard-etc)

~~~
proto-n
While not NP complete, reverting a hash function is in NP( _), so it is very
much affected if P=NP.

(_) Ok obviously it can't be in NP as it's not a decision problem, but asking
"is there a preimage starting with 1, with 1A, etc." _is_ in NP. From the it's
trivial to generate a preimage in P.

~~~
ChrisLomont
Inverting hash functions isn’t in NP, except that it’s constant time, so it’s
also trivially in P. Thus P=NP is irrelevant. It’s just the constant is large.
Since each common hash function is fixed size, inverting them is fixed size.

For a problem to be of interest regarding the P=NP question, the problem needs
to have arbitrarily large size. 3-SAT can be arbitrary sized, thus is a
candidate to ask if it’s NP hard, complete, etc. If we consider 3-SAT with
fixed, bounded size, then 3-SAT is constant time.

For example, inverting SHA-512 requires at most on order of 2^512 ops to
invert. This is constant time, not even polynomial time.

So no, hashing is not generally affected by P=NP.

~~~
mikorym
Chris, I am a bit over my head usually with P=NP, since it's not my area and I
have to warp it before it is.

One question I would have on your comment is: What kind of proof or
counterexample for P ?= NP _would_ in fact influence our study of hash
functions? This is a subjective question of course, but essentially I am
wondering what approach to P ?= NP _might_ introduce new mathematics that
indeed would have something to say about hash functions.

~~~
ChrisLomont
>What kind of proof or counterexample for P ?= NP would in fact influence our
study of hash functions?

None. Hash functions are almost all O(1) to invert, that is, constant time.
It's just we designed that constant to be prohibitively large.

And hash functions are not generally based on NP hard problems - they're based
on bit mixing, which for all common hash functions are completely orthogonal
to the question of P and NP.

Quantum computing, via Grover's algorithm, did impact hash functions one and
all, since it allows searching N unstructured items in O(sqrt(N)) time, while
classical computers require O(N) time. But this simply turns a 512 bit hash
into a 256 bit hash, still intractable.

Again, however, this has nothing to do with P?=NP.

For a problem to be changed by P?=NP, since most think P != NP, that problem
must be in NP/P, and hash functions are not (almost ever, and no common ones)
from that class of problems. Also the problem has to part of an infinite
family of such problems with unbounded sizes. Hash functions again are not in
this class.

Of course, it may be that we can build computers in the future with closed
timelike loops (CTL), in which case all problems are constant time, and that
may prove for that class of machines that the complexity hierarchy collapses,
but that is a long time off, if ever. We may be able to build machines that
exploit topological quantum field theories (TQFTs) some day, like in
Friedman's work, and again, that may break things, but again that is a long
time off, if ever.

I'd personally bet on P!=NP being a fundamental law of physics, built into the
fabric of the universe, in the It from Bit idea from Wheeler and others. I
think this is becoming more and more the mainstream science belief, as the
universe is looking more and more like computation.

------
markhollis
I wonder how prize winners feel about such huge sums of money. Especially that
very succesful people who win such prizes tend to win multiple prizes.

~~~
psychometry
Also, what does a tenured professor of mathematics do with such a sum other
than spend it on himself? It's not like he's going to build out a lab and hire
a bunch of research staff.

~~~
komali2
He's renting right now so him and his wife are going to buy a house.

~~~
doovd
Nice, he can get a shed in South Kensington now. Nice and close to Imperial.

------
vertbhrtn
"to focus fully on the world of ideas" \- very interesting choice of words.

------
tantalor
That's not what "scoops" means!

A scoop is publishing something before a rival can. You scoop the rival, not
the story/prize.

~~~
OJFord
I've never heard of scooping a rival - otherwise this is the same usage. A
publisher 'gets the scoop' (a great story, a win) or scoops the story just as
a mathematician scoops a prize.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Journalists get a scoop on their rivals when they publish impactful news
first.

~~~
OJFord
I've never heard that usage before either. ('on their'.) Whenever I've used or
heard it, the scoop is the prize-analagous story.

------
xiaodai
Kinda sad that emminent mathematicians can only rent...

------
Google234
This prize isn’t too highly regarded. The physics prize has mostly consisted
of string theorists giving it to their friends in the field.

~~~
doublesCs
What an ignorant thing to say.

~~~
mellosouls
Examples of criticism of the physics prize:

[https://physicsworld.com/a/breakthrough-prize-criticized-
for...](https://physicsworld.com/a/breakthrough-prize-criticized-for-
rewarding-failed-ideas/)

[http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11138](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11138)

[http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/08/special-
breakthroug...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/08/special-breakthrough-
prize-awarded-for.html)

~~~
protomolecule
They are all related to a single award -- 2019 (special) for supergravity.

~~~
mellosouls
They are just examples - and intended as counter to the "ignorant" accusation
which implies there was no truth to the idea of criticism.

~~~
gdy
Fair enough.

