There's a long backlog of major achievements in physics that haven't gotten a Nobel Prize in Physics.
Giving the prize to something that has essentially nothing to do with physics is just a slap in the face to the physics community.
Giving the prize to something that has essentially nothing to do with physics is just a slap in the face to the physics community.
The physics community could use a few more slaps in the face, according to many physicists.
The latter makes a bit more sense, computer science wasn't really a thing when Alfred Nobel was around, but mathematics certainly was! It seems like it would be perfectly reasonable to add a category for math, and I think Neural Nets would fit in there considerably better.
Still kind of weird that the prestigious award that everyone has heard of doesn't have a mathematics category.
A different institution can step up and make a price on its own, though I'm not sure what institution would have that amount of prestige without weaponizing it for commercial purposes.
I prefer a nicer price for mathematics that includes a bit of computer science than a price for computer science. I don't think there is much room for a "society-changing innovation" within CS that isn't either an engineering feat (Linux, Docker, FFmpeg) or an algorithm that could fit under a mathematics price (FFT, Navier Stokes).
I'm not sure I agree with that. There's plenty of theoretical computer science that isn't really "engineering" and would fall into a pretty different category than stuff like FFT or Navier Stokes.
If you look at something like Concurrency Theory, for example, and work with stuff like Pi Calculus or CSP or Petri Nets, those aren't "engineering feats", but also kind of fall into a different category than the rest of math, or at least pretty different than Navier Stokes. I think you could make a pretty strong argument that CSP has been a pretty big innovation in regards the academic state of the art while not simply being engineering.
I would still consider CSP, Petri Nets, and Pi-Calculus mathematical enough to be wrapped under a mathematics price if they're influential enough. The first true computer scientists were mathematicians, and I still feel that much of the theoretical work in the field is closer to "mathematics useful for computers" than its separate field.
In the spirit of the nobel price, "mathematics with the greatest humanitarian impact" leaves plenty of room for the inclusion of influential pieces from theoretical computer science, especially as those prices within mathematics that do exist already include loads of mathematics that require computers to prove or solve.
I guess, but they certainly feel categorically different than something like Runge-Kutta. They're more about the study of algorithms, which is generally where I've drawn the line of "computer science vs math".
What do you think could have reasonably been awarded?
The measurement of the Hubble constant using delay times between multiple images of lensed supernovae.
The first transit spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere.
The first directly imaged exoplanet.
(They could hand out Nobel Prizes in the field of exoplanets like candy.)
"conferred the greatest benefit to humankind"
So while those things are cool and groundbreaking, I'd say they have yet to cross the threshold into "greatest benefit to humankind"
Detecting gravitational radiation from the merger of two black holes was an incredible step forward for our understanding of the universe. It will not practically change your life in any way.
Some people still alive who made important contributions to this are Rees and Sunyaev.