# Fields medals & Nevanlinna prize 2014

hi all. a busy and eventful week. ICM2014 announced winners for fields medal & Nevanlinna prize in South Korea.

collected a bunch of links in a short amt of time.

there is some historical consternation about how Pulitzer did not have a category in mathematics. that debate can be found elsewhere.

the Fields medal is “worth” “only” less than \$15K in USD (in somewhat striking contrast to the recent announcement of up to 5 yearly \$3M Breakthrough prizes and the \$1M Abel prize). in terms of prestige, priceless. (but of course mathematicians are the least to worry about “practical applications” of their work right?) :star: :star: :star:

Gowers has a 1sthand account and is near-liveblogging the event. he has a lively/ colorful account including an adorable story about how Mirzakhani’s daughter was upset by costumes in the opening ceremony play. (semimiraculously, get quite a few hits from leaving comments/ links on his blogs.) it looks like all the lecture videos are available online.[a12]

the Fields medal is a bit rare also in how it has an age limit (40) as not! specified by its founder, but apparently the prize committee wanted to reward younger mathematicians, and emphasize fresh new breakthrough thinking, with major potential for future advances. 2-4 are awarded only every four years.[a]

# collatz freaky alien landscape

:!: :idea: :?: wow, this showed up while finally researching into graph centers using an algorithm suggested/ recommended by suresh, an idea that occurred to me over ½ year ago and finally got around to coding it recently (after realizing a fairly good greedy algorithm was quite easy to implement and runs quickly… its actually quite conceptually similar to Minimum Spanning Tree one of my favorite algorithms). the graph centers idea was intriguing and seems to work well in finding “few” graph centers that “cover” (via “intermediate hubs”) “blockwise-pieces” of the collatz graph. after looking at it, it was noisy but was also hard to even see an upward trend in number of graph centers required for the higher blockwise-pieces. (need to write this up at some point; am going to just append the undocumented code for the last version below for now).

# RIP robin williams. reflections on some personal/ math/ CS angles to his movies

hi all, a sad day yesterday as summer creeps to its end (by one basic measure its now over as many kids back in school already). my sig other is a big robin williams fan and have enjoyed/ admired him myself also over the years. however, brutally honestly/ truthfully (and there is some physical, emotional, spiritual brutality to this event/ tragedy), his manic energy did not always rub me the right way. something seemed a little off.

early on in his career, even in my teenage years he was cited zestily in moments of shared movie reviews/ comparisons and play/ frivolity by my humorous friends who somewhat unlike me were well-versed/ connected/ plugged in to movies, tv shows, hollywood & pop-culture. others cited his mythical connection to Boulder in his famous Mork and Mindy show, near where I grew up (some brief scenes/transition shots from that show are the real Boulder).[19]

he was extremely talented, a brilliant comedian and performer, but hollywood is the land of facades and masks, and it is now seen he was in some ways an archetype and poster boy of that. he was a court jester and a clown, and now the facepainted frown and tears are seen as more real than anyone imagined, in the dragon-eating-its-tail case of art imitating life, and life imitating art… :'(

# collatz binary mapping patterns similar to codes!

re collatz this surprising new finding jumped out at me recently. seems promising, still analyzing it. :idea: :!: :?:

again consider the collatz function as two possible operations, and one can determine a kind of “collatz hash ID” associated with each integer, where the operations are binary digits ‘0’ and ‘1’ in a string. one can define a set of numbers/strings $C(x, y)$ where $x$ is the total number of operations and $y$ is the number of a specific operation, in this case the $3n+1$ “op”. this functions somewhat similar to the combinatorial “Choose(x, y)” operation.

a. bigdata