Mark Braverman Wins the IMU Abacus Medal | Hacker News Reader

Mark Braverman Wins the IMU Abacus Medal

quantamagazine.org

48 pointsnsoonhui14 comments

For those interested in Braverman's actual scientific contributions, the mathunion.org page offers more information:

https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/imu-abacus-medal/abacus...

However, I did find even the citation and write-up there a bit lacking; the draft of his ICM talk at https://mbraverm.princeton.edu/files/ICM2022-Braverman.pdf is a much better source for his work.

A big part (majority?) of this work is rediscovery of the results from info theory (EE) community in the 90s (ctrl-f Orlitsky, Shor in the pdf).

The article seems to be an overview of the person, rather than anything detailed about a specific paper he wrote. Apparently he received an award recently?

This looks like it might be the paper the article mentions, though: https://mbraverm.princeton.edu/files/ICM2022-Braverman.pdf

I couldn't, for the life of me, sus out a clear summary of his work or why it's significant.

There's a joke here about understanding communication and I can't quite put my finger on it...

communication is evolving, quantamagazine.com is being left behind, and we're pretty sure it's this guy's fault

GPT3 summary: Assumes P != NP. That's all you need to know.

Yes, it's a bio associated with the award announcement.

Sort of like one of those personal sketches that are so popular in US Olympic coverage....

There's a place for this, though it helps to know what you're reading, and the article title is misleading in that regard --- this is about the award and winner, not the subject matter on which the award was based.

"A scientist" is Mark Braverman, a Princeton University computer scientist. He's won the 2022 IMU Medal for work in information and complexity theory.

I've suggested an alternate title (submission is "A scientist who developed a new way to understand communication") to the HN mods which manages to capture more of that.

(Future search on "Mark Braverman" would be more productive than "a scientist", among other justifications for the change. At least this content will trip on most of that.)

I've changed it to the HTML doc title for now, which says what the news actually is.

Thanks!

Maybe I'm mistaken but it seems to me that some of his work on communication is relevant for the development of attack-resilient decentralized networks with potentially adversarial nodes. A lot of these are under development.

Care to expand on that? It's an interesting suggestion, I don't quite see the link though.

Looks like he was the only IMO medalist of this year's batch. Is that common?

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