American wins $1 million math prize | Hacker News Reader

American wins $1 million math prize

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21 pointsjamesbritt10 comments

It's nice to see an older mathematician earn some recognition. The Fields Medal (the most prestigious prize in mathematics) is only given to people younger than 40, a cutoff which always seemed rather silly to me.

The cutoff is not so silly. Take the Nobel Prize in Physics, for instance. The award usually makes some already-famous professor more famous. It has no further impact on their career. I believe the cutoff is to make it more likely that the Fields Medal will have an tangible impact on the career of the receiver.

They are already famous because the research they did to earn a Nobel Prize made them famous.

Yeah, but that makes the award itself somewhat superfluous: giving recognition to research that's already widely recognized.

It's sort of a paradox. If the accomplishment was notable enough to be awarded then the award was superfluous, and if the accomplishment was not notable it doesn't deserve an award.

I think his point is these days good research doesn't need a medal to publicize itself. I imagine the situation was different when they made the rules (1936).

Well, one of the original goals of the Fields medal was to help entice young mathematicians to stay in academia and do research, in an attempt to counteract the lure of high-paying jobs in the outside world.

How so? If a mathematician is good enough to win the fields medal, he (she) can probably have the career he wants.

I haven't done research myself, but I've spent a fair amount of time around researchers in math and the basic sciences and my experience strongly suggests that the purpose of the Nobel etc, insofar as they have any, is not to advance the careers of the recipients (who don't need the help if they're deserving) or to drive the recipients to do better research (the consensus is that, if anything, earning a major prize dampens a researcher's potential, though of course that has selection bias written all over it); the purpose is really to give those researchers who've already reached the top of the playing field something to aspire to. (I used to think these prizes were net losses for science, but over time it's become clearer to me that the role they play is actually fairly important.)

All of this is to say: the actual distribution of prizes is more a necessary evil than anything, and delaying conferral to the end of a person's career minimizes the bad effects of a prize and maximizes the good ones.

(From http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/fields_medal....)

The genesis of the rule that it be awarded only to mathematicians no older than forty is evidently the statement that “… while it was in recognition of work already done, it was at the same time intended to be an encouragement for further achievement on the part of the recipients and a stimulus to renewed effort on the part of others”.

It's pretty interesting to see the record of the MacArthur awardees. They've a younger group than the Nobel laureates, but they've gone on to kick butt in myriad ways...

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