External links
- IMU Abacus Medal - Official site
- Rolf Nevanlinna Prizes – Official site
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The IMU Abacus Medal, known before 2022 as the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, [1] is awarded once every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), for outstanding contributions in Mathematical Aspects of Information Sciences including:
The prize was established in 1981 by the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union and named for the Finnish mathematician Rolf Nevanlinna. It consists of a gold medal and cash prize. The prize is targeted at younger theoretical computer scientists, and only those younger than 40 on January 1 of the award year are eligible. [2] It is awarded along with other IMU prizes including the Fields Medal. [3]
The prize was originally named to honour the Finnish mathematician Rolf Nevanlinna who had died a year before the prize's creation in 1981. The medal featured a profile of Nevanlinna, the text "Rolf Nevanlinna Prize", and very small characters "RH 83" on its obverse. RH refers to Raimo Heino, the medal's designer, and 83 to the year of first minting. On the reverse, two figures related to the University of Helsinki, the prize sponsor, are engraved. The rim bears the name of the prizewinner. [4]
Alexander Soifer, president of the World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions, complained about the prize's honouring of Nevanlinna, as he was a supporter of Hitler and had acted as a representative for the Finnish Volunteer Battalion of the Waffen-SS during World War II. Soifer discussed Nevanlinna's wartime activities in a 2015 book, and forwarded his personal and his organization’s requests to the Executive Committee of IMU to change the Prize's name. [5] [6] In July 2018, the 18th General Assembly of the IMU decided to remove the name of Rolf Nevanlinna from the prize. [7] It was later announced that the prize would be named the IMU Abacus Medal. [1]
| Year | Laureate | Reasons |
|---|---|---|
| 1982 | Robert Tarjan | "Received the first Nevanlinna Prize for outstanding contributions to mathematical aspects of information science. "Pure mathematics enjoys the luxury of studying its constructions, whether finite or infinite, in complete independence of all questions of efficiency." explained Jacob Schwartz, who spoke on Tarjan's work. "By contrast, theoretical computer science must ultimately concern itself with computing engines which operate with limited speed and data storage, and therefore must take efficiency as one of its central concerns. Two closely related activities, algorithm design and algorithm analysis, grow out of this inevitable concern." [8] |
| 1986 | Leslie Valiant | "Valiant has contributed in a decisive way to the growth of almost every branch of the fast growing young tree of theoretical computer science, his theory of counting problems being perhaps his most important and mature work." [9] |
| 1990 | Alexander Razborov | "For his groundbreaking work on lower bounds for circuit complexity." [10] |
| 1994 | Avi Wigderson | "For his outstanding work on the mathematical foundations of computer science. The objects of research there include, for example, finding efficient methods for solving complex tasks as well as upper and lower bounds for the computational effort for certain problems. Wigderson made a significant contribution to understanding the paradoxical term "zero-knowledge interactive proofs". [11] |
| 1998 | Peter Shor | "For his outstanding work on quantum computation and in particular for deriving the Shor's algorithm." |
| 2002 | Madhu Sudan | "For important contributions to several areas of theoretical computer science, including probabilistically checkable proofs, non-approximability of optimization problems, and error-correcting codes." |
| 2006 | Jon Kleinberg | "For deep, creative and insightful contributions to the mathematical theory of the global information environment, including the influential "hubs and authorities"-algorithm; methods for discovering short chains in large social networks; techniques for modeling, identifying and analyzing bursts in data streams; theoretical models of community growth in social networks; and contributions to the mathematical theory of clustering." |
| 2010 | Daniel Spielman [12] | "For smoothed analysis of Linear Programming, algorithms for graph-based codes and applications of graph theory to Numerical Computing." |
| 2014 | Subhash Khot [13] | "For his prescient definition of the “Unique Games” problem, and leading the effort to understand its complexity and its pivotal role in the study of efficient approximation of optimization problems; his work has led to breakthroughs in algorithmic design and approximation hardness, and to new exciting interactions between computational complexity, analysis and geometry." [14] |
| 2018 | Constantinos Daskalakis [15] | "For transforming our understanding of the computational complexity of fundamental problems in markets, auctions, equilibria, and other economic structures. His work provides both efficient algorithms and limits on what can be performed efficiently in these domains." [16] |
| 2022 | Mark Braverman | "For his path-breaking research developing the theory of information complexity, a framework for using information theory to reason about communication protocols. His work has led to direct-sum theorems giving lower bounds on amortized communication, ingenious protocol compression methods, and new interactive communication protocols resilient to noise." [17] |
| | This science awards article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years. The name of the award honours the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields.
The International Mathematical Union (IMU) is an international non-governmental organization devoted to international cooperation in the field of mathematics across the world. It is a member of the International Science Council (ISC) and supports the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). Its members are national mathematics organizations from more than 80 countries.
Rolf Herman Nevanlinna was a Finnish mathematician who made significant contributions to complex analysis.
Peter Williston Shor is an American professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer.
The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU).
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Razborov, sometimes known as Sasha Razborov, is a Soviet and Russian mathematician and computational theorist. He is Andrew McLeish Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
The Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize for Applications of Mathematics is a mathematics award, granted jointly by the International Mathematical Union and the German Mathematical Society for "outstanding mathematical contributions that have found significant applications outside of mathematics". The award receives its name from the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. With its premiere in 2006, it is to be awarded every fourth year, at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian mathematician and a professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.
Daniel Alan Spielman has been a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Yale University since 2006. As of 2018, he is the Sterling Professor of Computer Science at Yale. He is also the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, since its founding, and chair of the newly established Department of Statistics and Data Science.
Helge Holden is a Norwegian mathematician working in the field of differential equations and mathematical physics. He was Praeses of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters from 2014 to 2016.
Constantinos Daskalakis is a Greek theoretical computer scientist. He is a professor at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize and the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2018.
The Chern Medal is an international award recognizing outstanding lifelong achievement of the highest level in the field of mathematics. The prize is given at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which is held every four years.
Subhash Khot is an Indian-American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who is the Julius Silver Professor of Computer Science in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Khot has contributed to the field of computational complexity, and is best known for his unique games conjecture.
The Leelavati Award is an award for outstanding contribution to public outreach in mathematics. It is named after the 12th-century mathematical treatise "Lilavati" devoted to arithmetic and algebra written by the Indian mathematician Bhāskara II, also known as Bhaskara Achārya. In the book the author posed, in verse form, a series of problems in (elementary) arithmetic to one Leelavati and followed them up with hints to solutions. This work appears to have been the main source of learning arithmetic and algebra in medieval India. The work was also translated into Persian and was influential in West Asia.
Marcelo Miranda Viana da Silva is a Brazilian mathematician working in dynamical systems theory.
Svetlana Yakovlevna Jitomirskaya is a Soviet-born American mathematician working on dynamical systems and mathematical physics. She is a distinguished professor of mathematics at Georgia Tech and UC Irvine. She is best known for solving the ten martini problem along with mathematician Artur Avila.
Alfio Quarteroni is an Italian mathematician.
Mark Braverman is an Israeli mathematician and theoretical computer scientist. He was awarded an EMS Prize in 2016 as well as Presburger Award in the same year. In 2019, he was awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award. In 2022 he won the IMU Abacus Medal.
Olena Oleksandrivna Vaneeva is a Ukrainian mathematician and researcher and vice head of the Institute of Mathematics, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her interests include group analysis of differential equations and integrable systems, and partial differential equations.