UK Mathematician Wins Richest Prize in Academia
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UK mathematician wins richest prize in academia:
Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.
Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem.
His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to regularity structures", so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.
[...] Hairer's expertise lies in stochastic partial differential equations, a branch of mathematics that describes how randomness throws disorder into processes such as the movement of wind in a wind tunnel or the creeping boundary of a water droplet landing on a tissue. When the randomness is strong enough, solutions to the equations get out of control. In some cases, the solutions fluctuate so wildly that it is not even clear what the equation meant in the first place," he said.
With the invention of regularity structures, Hairer showed how the infinitely jagged noise that threw his equations into chaos could be reframed and tamed. When he published the theory in 2014, it made an immediate splash.
[...] While his peers roundly consider Hairer a genius, he admits mathematics can be infuriating. Most of the time it doesn't work out. As pretty much every single graduate student in mathematics can attest, during your PhD you probably spend two-thirds of your time getting stuck and banging your head against a wall."
Differential equations come in different forms; among them: Ordinary, Partial, and Non-linear. Martin worked on solving to stochastic differential equations.
Journal Reference:
Hairer, Martin. A theory of regularity structures, (DOI: 10.1007/s00222-014-0505-4)
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